


take your time with me to make you feel alive

by meditationonbaal



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Blood Play, Choking, F/M, Language, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-16 17:28:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13641027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meditationonbaal/pseuds/meditationonbaal
Summary: Post-season three set somewhere in the desert southwest. Turned into a series of sorts with no real purpose.





	1. take your time with me to make you feel alive

**A/N: I’m sorry in advance for all the awful puns. I started out sober writing this. Predictably, the drunker I got, the dirtier this became. I wrote this in a fit of pieces all thrown together.**

**I’ve always loved Tarantino’s method of writing a scene. He runs through his records, hears a song, and then writes the scene. The song is the spirit of the scene in his words.**

**Songs for this:**

**Non e Niente by Catherine Spaak**  
**La Llorona by Chavela Vargas**  
**Obsesion by Chavela Vargas**  
**Dead Eyes by Guadalcanal Diary**  
**Vicious by Lou Reed**  
**I Can Never Go Home Anymore by the Shangri-Las**  
**Only in Dreams by Wheezer**  
**Alive by Adult Video**

**Guess which songs fit which parts ;P**

 

* * *

 

 

It never occurred to her how cold the high desert could get, and the dichotomy confuses her, how the sun can feel so close and the air so arctic sharp despite. Cutting and arid, a burning cold. Reptiles don’t do so well in the cold, but there are those odd creatures like the frog that freezes overwinter and hops on when the ice melts. Reptiles den up in the winter, she knows, and sometimes they don’t care who they share the hole with. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Is that what they are doing now? Brumating – sounds like bro mating; she laughs to herself, at herself.

 

Each city they pull into looks the same as the last, and she think maybe it was the same movers and shakers hustling through the southwest and setting up shop, given a clean slate, wasting it, repeating themselves again and again. Tucson, Vegas, El Paso – they all look the same from afar, identical sprawls and varying shades of burnt pink and drab, sand and rock and sharp objects.

 

Everything in the desert is either dead or dying, always somewhere along the spectrum, but there is always this lingering. Even the dead things linger too long, constant reminders of the severity of the landscape, a nudge to let you know you are always on the edge.

 

She likes Albuquerque more than the last place, though. They spend a while there, feeling the sun get closer and closer. She feels it as the weather changes, the quiet period of hibernation is coming to an end, the itch setting back in, the urge to hop on.

 

They rent a casita on the outskirts of town behind the home of two snowbirds. The couple don’t mind they pay in cash, and they migrate for even warmer climes south of the border. Taking on boarders was just an excuse to bring in house sitters and still get paid.

 

She likes the privacy of the property at the end of a dirt road, backed up against the hills scattered with stunted junipers and rolling golden grass. At twilight, she can hear a pack of coyotes calling each other from one hill to the next. Sometimes she spies their luminescent eyes appearing and disappearing as they weave through the junipers behind the property. Sometimes they come and drink the pool water, and she studies their mottled hides from behind the sliding glass doors, faces and bodies too narrow and sneaky for a wolf.

 

She spends her days climbing up and down the hills behind the house, sliding down into washes and peering into burrows for a surprise. She collects the things she finds out there, shell casings, bleached animal bones, red-tailed hawk feathers, a rattle from a dead Diamondback thirteen buttons long. She finds rocks that look like petrified blood, and later Richie tells her its jasper. She lines her discoveries along the ledge beneath her bedroom window, runs her fingers along jagged edges of jasper and contrasts this with the downy softness of hawk feathers. She asks Richie why so many raptors and rattlesnakes have coon-patterned tails.

 

At night, sometimes they climb down into a wash and drink beer, set up the empties in the openings of abandoned packrat dens for target practice. It surprises her watching them shoot, the pistols merely natural extensions of their hands, their arms perfectly counterbalanced to the weight of the gunmetal and steel. Sometimes they practice quickdraw, fingers splayed taut with their hands dangling next to their hips, a Red Apple dangling from their bottom lip. A lazy drag and the ember smolders briefly, dissipates, ash drops and before it even hits the ground, the line of bottles is nothing but technicolor glass shattered across the mess of cactus needles and dried twigs.

 

The first time she tries to quickdraw, she grabs the gun too high and the slide slices her between thumb and forefinger. Richie grabs her hand, nearly brings it to his mouth. “You, be cool,” she whispers, and he wraps a handkerchief around her palm instead.

 

She sticks a spoonful of prickly pear sorbet in her mouth, lets the sticky bubblegum sweetness melt on her tongue, staining her lips and tongue a bruised pink. A string quartet starts up on the grassy lawn next to the church, and she lets her eyes scan all the formalwear, delineates the rentals from the fitted. All the bridesmaids have baby’s breath intertwined in their updos and sprays of it across each groomsman’s chest pocket. The bride carries a bouquet of calla lilies up the walk, and Pachelbel spills over into the wedding march. She steals away into another shopfront before the girl makes it to the altar, watches from behind a shelf of porcelain calaveras painted an array of colors, studies the way the groom takes his girl bride’s hands. She guesses at the verses the priest delivers from rote, the page the maid of honor rips from the good book to give to the bride. She mulls another spoonful of syrupy prickly pear over her tongue, touches the tip to her palate. Her mouth must look like a careless gory mess framed by grinning candy-colored skulls in the glass window.

 

She used to the love the thought of being married in her father’s church, pleased with the idea her father would deliver her down the aisle and take his place at the head of the altar. It was the natural progression of things. The first half of her life had always been a predictable but pleasing outcome. Growing up she’d loved her father’s sermons, even the fire and brimstone lectures, lit up inside by the fervor of his spirituality, smile soft when he spoke of God’s love and catching vestigial scents of sulfur when he quoted His wrath. She had hoped he would give her away at the altar with equal conviction, with both a blessing and a warning in one breath. He was always so good at that, at making her feel safe while keeping her wary.

 

She learned too early God doesn’t solve everything, that faith is not a substitute for action. Before her mother died, her father oft quoted the Son, preached forgiveness, trust, faith, those virtues that left a kaleidoscope of pastels in her mind’s eye. After, her father pawned his wedding ring and remarried Revelations, piled them all into a sketchy Winnie hoping to escape what followed the Rapture. Perhaps they both realized it at the same time.

 

She let Kyle kiss her in the Sunday school room following the Sunday service, the first one her father had ever failed to show for. She sat in the front pew alone, the same seats her family held for nearly two decades, her hands clasped knuckle white in her lap as she stared wild-eyed at the empty lectern. She eyed the service pamphlets stacked in her mother’s spot, read the front page verse her father chose the week before.

 

He cancelled the last three services, sauntering through the Fuller home searching for bottles he’d hidden in different corners of the house. He’d slept on the couch for a month straight. He somehow lost his wedding ring in the garbage disposal, and Scott nearly lost three fingers retrieving it from the trap. The congregation understood. They didn’t call in a substitute. They didn’t apply pressure. They were a docile and sympathetic flock. Then a morning and she smelled pancakes and heard her father offkey singing the Stanley Brothers. He tapped his right ring finger against his favorite mug as his children scarfed down blueberry pancakes. He wanted them to hear his scratched-up ring clink against the porcelain while he told them his ideas for the next sermon. She offered to organize the pamphlets for the coming Sunday. It wasn’t until she was washing dishes that she remembered he broke that mug weeks before, hurled it at the wall during dinner one night. She noticed all the chips he couldn’t fix.

 

As each family departs, the flock slowly coming to terms with losing another pillar of their community, she slides her hand over the stack of pamphlets, watches one by one each stapled sheaf of papers so light zig zag to the ground like feathers.

 

In the Sunday school, Kyle stayed and helped her put everything back, the boxes of half-used crayons and finger-paints she’d set out earlier that morning in preparation. Suddenly he changes his mind and sets two blank coloring pages on the undersized table. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the tiny chairs, knees bumping each other, while they both color in the lines and use all the right colors and produce the same result. He asks her if she is planning anything for graduation in a couple months, and she side eyes the wooden cross dangling from his neck, studies the pinned Jesus he whittled himself. And then he leans over and kisses her with his palm flat on her colored-in burning bush. She sighs into him, smiles into his mouth, because then that was the way things were supposed to go, that simple normalcy, manageable and predictable and comfortable. He whispers a verse from a song of Solomon and kisses her again, risks tongue, and she tugs on his wooden cross to bring him down to her level.

 

He gives her a ride home in his red Ford pickup, lets her place her hand over his on the stick shift as he takes them along the scenic route.

 

She closes her eyes behind the glass window when the bride and groom turn to seal their contract with God.

 

She steals a porcelain calavera with purple mariposa lily eyes, warms it in her palm as she walks back to where they said they’d pick her up. She waits in the empty lot eating wild grapes from the vine,, tests how far she can spit the seeds. The black cougar comes peeling into the vacant lot, spraying pea gravel at the cement wall fifteen feet to her right. Richie steps out of the passenger side, yanks the seat forward so she can clamber in. She feels his hand curve along her ass, fingertips pressing into the white linen of her sundress as he guides her into the backseat. When she looks at Seth, he seems oblivious behind enigmatic Ray Bans. Richie pops the seat back and slides back into the passenger side. As soon as the door closes, Seth shifts into first and quickly into third.

 

She manipulates the calavera in her hands, juggles it between her palms, tries to ignore the heat in the shape of his palm left behind, stares down into the blank excitement of the mariposa pupils and runs her tongue across her teeth to catch any residual sweetness. She digs around in the edges of the seat and finds one of the seatbelts hidden between the cushions, stuffs it back in. Seth hears her squirming and squeaking around in the backseat and adjusts the rearview mirror. Richie looks straight on ahead.

 

She pokes at the leather bowling bag on the seat next to her, muses what the brothers Gecko would look like in matching shirts with white piping and cursive Gecko embroidered over the chest pocket. She doesn’t find an eighteen-pound blue shiner in the duffel, though. She runs her fingers along a stack of crisp hundreds like sifting through the pages of a book. She places both feet over the shotgun lying along the floor of the backseat, wondering if it’s still warm from where it cozied up along Seth’s leg under his slacks or from firing a few shots into the ceiling. She knows he likes sporting a shotty under his pantleg before they bust through the front door of whatever score, keep the ladies guessing as to what firepower he has going on down there.

 

He stands in the way of the sun, casts a long shadow across her floating. She tips her head up, keeps her body like a starfish. “Do you still see blood?” she wonders.

 

He fishes in his suit jacket pocket for the pack of Red Apples, doesn’t answer her. He takes a seat on one of the lounges under the pergola, the vinyl straps straining under his black slacks. She watches him whip the Zippo right quick back and forth across his pantleg, shield the flame from wind and light his cigarette.

 

She sidestrokes to the pool edge, lays her arms along the warm concrete with her chin balanced on the tile lining. The desert wind is like a blow-dryer, but it still raises gooseflesh along her forearms. Her fingers snap at him in an appeal for a drag, and the corner of his mouth curls up in something halfway between a sneer and a smile as he shifts across the lounge to hand her the rest of the cigarette. She takes a pull and returns it. She just wanted a taste, just wanted to have something safe and indirect, and he rolls his eyes when he takes it back, places it between his lips as he removes his suit jacket. She always wondered how they both could wear all that black under the desert sun.

 

“Déjà vu,” he finally says, resting his elbows on his knees. He always buttons the last button, always. “So, what did you find today, peaches?”

 

She knows she’s turned into a bit of a hoarder. Just like him. He follows her gaze to the calavera nestled atop her crumpled sundress. He reaches down to pick it up, and she notices how small it looks in his hand compared to hers, like he could curl his fingers and make it disappear, crush it, swallow it up in that awful eye. Sometimes she gets afraid when he touches her with that hand, searching his palm before it makes contact. He knows that.

 

“These are offerings to the dead,” he tells her. She hoped he would tell her. She likes having an endless fount of knowledge at her disposal, even it if it chafes his brother. She can put anything in Richie’s hands and get an answer, unwarranted or not. He notes the lilies in the eyes. “Have you been thinking about your mother?” Unwarranted or not.

 

“Do you still see blood?” she returns.

 

He finishes the cigarette and drops it to the concrete. She watches the spray of embers across the cement before he crushes the ember under one polished brogue. Richie doesn’t lie, and his refusal to answer the question tells her he still sees plenty of it, probably sees her swimming in it. He looks at her wrists flexed against the concrete and notices the unblemished undersides, the intact network of translucent blue veins against pale skin, no blink of evidence of what horrors passed there. She turns her wrists downwards, flattens her palms against the concrete and hauls herself from the pool dripping.

 

She reaches one wet hand for the top button of his shirt, slips the little thing from its slit. One eyebrow on his monster-mash looking face arches up in interest. “Later, gator,” she tells him, leaving him with her wrinkled sundress and the candy skull smiling dumbly up at him.

 

In her bedroom, she places the little scented cone saturated with jasmine and sandalwood inside the censer tarnished inside. She strikes a Twister match and lights the incense, replaces the top of the censer, watches the smoke flow in ribbons from the diamond-shaped openings. She locks her door and strips out of her bikini, leaves it in a puddle next to her hamper, finds a pair of clean cotton panties to pull on, the pale pink ribbon bow fraying. She breathes in deep and checks her forearms, runs fingers obsessively over each veiny ridge. The cross burns against her clavicle. Her eyes run across the treasures lined up along her window – hawk feathers and jagged jasper and rusty nails and her father’s scratched-up wedding ring, the thing her brother chanced fingers over.  

 

Best box man in the southwest only needs a bump key and well-practiced wristwork to bring down all her barriers.

 

She stands bare from the waist up next to the open window, a half-deity before an altar she erected for someone she isn’t sure she became – bleached animal bones and raptor feathers and voodoo around the forgotten keepsakes of her dead blood.

 

“Get out of my room.”

 

He wants to ask if she pays rent, bites his tongue and grins instead. “I thought we could pray on it.” He holds up the calavera with the mariposa eyes an ugly bruised purple. “Our Father,” he begins, closes his hand around the skull made of clay and hollow, filled with nothing but empty prayers.

 

She cuts him off, “Suicides don’t go to heaven.”

 

He joins her next to the window, splays his fingers out to feel the hot wind coming through. She has enough bones to complete some unknown creature, something straight out of Nellis or Roswell. He places the calavera between the skull of some cactus mouse and coyote vertebrae.

 

“You smell like sickly sweet,” he comments, pressing his nose to her temple, inhaling.

 

“Hold the sickly,” she amends.

 

There was no self-conscious scrambling to protect any modesty that first encounter by the pool. He remembers that. She does, too. She asked him for a cigarette and he obliged. As simple as that. Pinkening in the high noon sun, she failed to inhale, and he stuck pins into all the places he sensed would leave a mark.

 

He produces her sundress, rumpled and dusty. “What’s the point?” she wonders.

 

“Decency,” he tries. “Don’t you want to be the good one?”

 

He wants that. He wants to be the one that tears it all down, and he is, he was, but it happened quickly and before, even when he wasn’t there. She pulls the wrinkled sundress overhead, the ties at her shoulders undone. He ties them for her. All is right with the world.

 

The petrified blood sings along the window ledge, desert wind ruffling the hawk feathers, calavera teeth jittering. She is all wrong with the world, she knows.

 

Richie chuckles to himself, runs his fingers along the sharp edges of jasper, circles her room in their lonely casita. He once made fun of Seth for only looking as far as his eight by ten, wonders if she fails to look past the confines of this finite space, lives her life in the span of twenty-four hours like the Stranger, which day she picks to live that last day out.

 

He takes a seat on her bed never made, a quilt handmade by one of the absent snowbirds. He picks at the scenes in each patch, each one a passage, a verse, a promise from the Eye above. He wants to tell her his eye is the only one that matters. Eyes find eyes.

 

She feels herself like some perfect visage in a snow globe, a perfect world where nothing could hurt her, change her, ruin her. She watches him slide his hand along the curve of one well-trained thigh stretched along her twin mattress, tracing how she might fit just right. He looks gargantuan on her bed, his torso tilting the headboard towards the wall. Will she always be a dancing figurine in a box waiting for this joker to break the clasp?

 

She wants to tell him to go fuck himself, predicts his response. ‘I’d rather…’

 

As she slips into the space between his thighs, she remembers hell wasn’t much different from here and now. Perhaps the world always felt just a hair away from whatever Mad-Max hellion landscape waited on the other side. She thinks many of the desert cities are like that, spurred on for something new and met with the same song, different verse – exactly what she imagined hell would be like. Searching, finding no purchase on that fantastical El Rey fools like Seth drawled on about. Richie never asked for El Rey. She never gave it much thought, either. Seth tried to sell it, and the two just wondered what could be better than the here and now. What could be wonderfully worse than the here and now.

 

He lets her hook her knees over his, spreads his wide to keep her just right. His whole hand able to encompass the majority of her ribcage and her small soft breast, thumb pressed over one dusky pink nipple. And his other hand splays across the expanse of her throat, lets her breathe in once before he sinks in.

 

She knows you cannot control what comes through, and so whatever he gets after poking holes in the veneer is his for the taking, randomly offered, unrelated amalgamations of her thoughts, memories, inconsequential and epiphanic alike. It flows one-way, and she gets nothing in return. She feels herself sliding out through the external carotid and speeding down into whatever nothing place exists inside him.

 

She closes her eyes when the groom leans into his girl bride, pastes her own face over that visage, stares up into the kaleidoscope of faces – Kyle, her father, Scott, Freddie, Seth, Richie.

 

It’s an infection, she knows. It got into her too early. It’s kept her going, though. She escaped it for the most part – her mother’s inclinations towards downward spirals, her father’s wandering eyes toward the line of bottles on the wall. Faith is not a substitute for action, she reminds herself day after day. She can admit it never occurred to her before Richie, before the Gecko brothers set. Kyle was sweet and easy, and he loved her. She knows he sees it on the live feed from her carotid, Kyle declaring it with Proverbs 3:15, and his jaw contracts just a little meaner at this, meaner still when she returns the favor. And everything after a mess of empty shell casings and used needles and blood on the walls, all in her tiny palm, her girl bride face.

 

She can taste the prickly pear on the back of her tongue and smell the sharp metallic gunshot residue spattered across knuckles that edge underneath the skirt of her dress and leaving trace smatterings of grey across the front of her white cotton panties. She cannot give up the mundanities of her former life, the simple panties, the virginal dresses, her baptismal gold cross hanging on that thin chain. There are still things she holds onto, desperately.

 

When she closes her eyes, her skulls feels heavy with her thoughts, an infant with a noggin swimming in new and bright thoughts like a bobblehead doll, things she cannot see clearly yet. Does she taste sickly sweet or like a thousand bodies writhing in a pit of _causa-sui_ despair?

 

_‘What kind of other things do you pick up on? Underage girls?’_

_He smiles. ‘That would be despicable.’_

 

Don’t you always end up tearing into the heart of things, Richie? What sweet trick will you take away this time?

 

He parrots that poor young boy who loved her without question with a song of Solomon. “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.” His fingers trace the hem of her panties, threatening satisfaction. “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm.” She sees the red-tailed hawk take flight behind her eyes, the spray of ruddy tail feathers, the variety of morphs much like the culebras – each a new flavor, a special talent unearthed in each new turn. “For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.” The levies break between her thighs. “Many waters cannot quench love; neither can floods drown it.” He skirts the consequences, delves just deep enough to sate her, never enough to steal it all away. No, only one thing should have that honor, one essential part.

 

Her orgasm is mahogany obsidian – a dark sharp thing twisted with blood. She thinks for a moment it’s a pistol lodged in the front of his slacks, much like when he cupped his palm across her mouth and stole her away into the three by three Winnie bathroom at the checkpoint. His brother mad-dogging the accordion door to the john. Richie keeping the root of her spine pressed to the nine-millimeter stashed in his pants, leather and buckle digging into her sacrum, to the sacred bone.

 

He laves at the two puncture wounds in the aftermath, runs his tongue along one taut tendon as her nails bite into the meat of his thighs. His palm is flat along her sternum, the center pressed to the handle of the sword. He pulls two franken-fingers from her cunt, slides them into his mouth to mingle with the remnants of santa sangre. He was never much of a wine-drinker; he preferred the complexity of a single-malt. But, this blended will do just fine, without compare.


	2. the place where we start tears me apart

**Songs:**

**Ghosts on the Road by Guadalcanal Diary**

**I Wanna Be Your Dog by Iggy Pop and the Stooges**

**Gun by Voyager One**

**Alive by Adult Video**

 

Seth steers the cougar into the coming curve, breaks hard to let the back tires swing the rear of the car into the turn. As the tires straighten, he strips the sunglasses off his face so he can see the road better, tosses them onto the empty seat next to him.

 

“Weren’t you supposed to be the shield?” he argues with the rearview mirror, tilts it upwards and catches the boys in blue rounding the same corner tracing his tread marks.

 

A bloody hand shoots forward from the front seat, middle finger presented pretty in a sit-and-spin fashion.

 

“Still fucking hurts, dick.” Richie struggles to shrug out of his suit jacket, and Kate realizes why they wear black. So no one can see them bleed.

 

“You’re such a fucking bullet magnet lately,” Richie groans, his elbows still caught in the jacket.

 

He writhes against the fabric, and Kate tells him to stop moving for a second. She gets a flash of something she’s not sure of, something imagined, something not – Richie wrapped up in himself. A man in a leather coat with a mandarin collar, enigmatic eyes behind sunglasses in the dim of the psych ward but his smile bright and adoring like the sun, cinching the straps taut behind Richie struggling, and she’s hushing, brushing her palm across Richie’s damp brow, carding fingers through his hair. So many things she does and does not remember.

 

“Settle for a moment,” she coaxes, and he exhales roughly, stills anyway. She makes him narrow his arms behind him, extend his elbows, and he moans as he feels the slugs shift in his guts, but she manages to slide the jacket the rest of the way off.

 

“Hey,” he grinds out. “Do me a favor.” She is already reaching for the top button of his shirt, the collar visceral red from where a bullet grazed just under his jaw. “It’s just you got tiny fingers,” he reasons and she nods yeah, yeah. She eases a round out the space under his right clavicle, hears the bones click back into place and fuse. She drops the bullet on the seat next to him.

 

Seth weaves between the cars on the frontage road, jerks the cougar to the right to avoid an oncoming semi. Kate’s fingers accidentally snag on the entry hole next to his stomach as she’s tossed to the side, and Richie reflexively grabs her wrist, bites his tongue. She nips her lip over an apology, waits for his grip to relax and let her wrist take back its original shape.

 

Richie shouts from the backseat for Seth to keep it fucking steady. Seth demonstrates an empty stroking motion with his free hand, and Richie kicks the back of his seat.

 

Richie knocks his head into the seat cushion as her small fingers search in the opening just below his ribcage. “I think it’s too deep in there,” she explains, and he sighs, “Excuses, excuses.” But then her index finger brushes against jagged metal, manages to scoop the remnants of the last hollow point out of his abdominal cavity. Richie grunts as she slides the last slug out of his stomach. She reaches across him to pile it with a clink next to the other eight rounds, feels his breath heavy against her neck, his hand covering the one she’s got between his legs on the seat cushion to steady herself.

 

“Help me out,” he whispers. She turns her head, and he presses his forehead to hers. “I just did,” she answers.

 

He grins, swallows back some pain. “I’m asking too much of you today, Katie-Cakes.”

 

She sighs, looks down at her hand disappeared by his.

 

“We’re not out of the hole yet,” he contends.

 

“And you need to be tip top,” she confirms. “Don’t you?”

 

He answers by lifting her hand, turns her delicate wrist up so he can run the rough pad of his thumb along the elegant mingling of veins under her skin, applies pressure to her radial pulse. She feels his own pulse there, cannot differentiate the two. “Not too much,” she tries.

 

“I’ll leave you standing,” he promises, raising her wrist to his mouth. She watches his fangs drop, his jaw unhinge.

 

“Seriously?” Seth says to the rearview.

 

“He says he needs it to heal,” Kate appeals.

 

Seth scoffs. “My sweet dick.”

 

The cougar lurches off the frontage road, flies under a series of bridges, her stomach flips, and Richie sinks in to tender flesh. She watches the spaghetti bowl of roads coming up, ignores the headiness, the fullness expanding behind her eyes as the light alternates shadow and bright. She muses he always manages to tap a vein, x marks the spot, and wonders if he ever helped Seth apply the needle, slipped it in nice and expert.

 

“Richie,” she murmurs. She spends time feeding Geckos, she realizes, gives one the needle and the other the vein.

 

She runs her index finger over the healing entry wound in his stomach, skirts the edges still raw and slightly charred. She knows what a bullet feels like, gutted and burned all at once. There’s no evidence left. Her body is not a canvas of hurts like everyone else, like Seth’s, a good little boy scout earning his badges of pain and suffering, all the necessities of being a real person. She doesn’t feel like a real person anymore.

 

She notes the same paucity of scars on Richie’s torso, not a one from before. He’s watching her, eyes yellow, which she doesn’t prefer, and predatory, no complaints there.

 

Her gaze folds down on the bowling bag, the Winston shotgun, the stethoscope and the drill – oldies but goldies, and the brothers are suckers for tradition.

 

He sees memories on her pulse, like an EKG in ether tied to each thought she's ever had, every image ever burned to the back of her mind. In her judgment, it’s tit for tat. _I’ll show you mine, since I ipso facto took yours._ The fingers of his free hand play with the ends of her hair, an auburn she thought was a dye but never managed to grow out of, the color of insides. Richie’s insides are all over her hands.

 

“Wrap it up,” Seth calls from the front. She hasn’t heard sirens in a while.

 

Seth tells her he’s going to let her out soon, be ready. He’s already on Plan B, figures they won’t be able to linger after this last score, the bulls licking at their heels. Richie licks her palm, runs his tongue between her fingers.

 

“Ew, that’s yours.” She tries to yank her hand away, but he pulls her index finger all the way into his mouth. God, she could probably put her whole hand and more in that monster gullet. “I’m not a kitten.”

 

He smiles, playfully bites her at the second knuckle. She pushes his face away, her finger coming away from his lips with a sick, sucking sound.

 

“Stop dicking around,” Seth scolds, snapping his fingers behind him. “Richie, fucking focus.”

 

Disaffected, Richie slides his eyes over Seth, corner of his mouth ticking up self-satisfied. He grabs his suit jacket shot full of holes, finds a stretch of fabric not soaked with blood, and tears a fresh strip off. Kate’s gathering her wits when Richie gathers her bitten wrist, goes about wrapping it with the remnants of his jacket. “You should clean this when you get back to the apartment,” he suggests.

 

“I won’t have time.” She kicks the bowling bag at her feet.

 

He explains, “They say a person’s bite is worse than a dog’s.” 

 

She hears the word bullshit in her head, guttural on the bull, shushing on the shit. “You’re not quite a person.” He wasn’t quite a person before either, she remembers. _I can see things_.

 

Even today in the bank, Seth noticed they were missing one, a teller. Her coworker piped up, eyes clenched shut behind coke-bottle glasses, her hands raised above her head in supplication. “She’s sick.” And while Seth tilted his head to ferret out the lie, Richie took four steps to the right and kicked down the door to the supply closet, produced the missing puzzle piece. He’d politely asked for the phone in her hand; the teller obliged, and he lifted the receiver to his ear, listened to the 911-dispatcher for a beat before cordially asking her to leave a message. The teller shuddered when he brought the heel of his oxford down, shattering the glass screen, the display flickering before dying with his civility.

 

“Seven at seventh,” Seth reminds her as he comes up to a good enough drop point on east Fremont.

 

She thinks for a moment he is going to make her tuck and roll until the cougar screeches to a complete stop. Seth pushes the passenger side door open, flips the seat down, and she clambers through with the bowling bag heavy on her shoulder. The bag gets lodged between the seat and the door rim, though, until Richie reaches over and shoves it through, the weight of the bag propelling her forward. She has to catch herself on a parking meter, hears Seth curtly repeat the time and place. Seth doesn’t bother to close the door, accelerating into third gear, flying left through the next four-way stop and letting the curve slam the door for him.

 

She jogs into the alley just before the bulls come charging through. Once the sirens fade, she crosses the street to use the payphone, calls a cab. She orders the cabbie to drop her off three blocks before the apartment. The driver catches a flash of her hand, Richie’s blood drying on her palm, when she pays him, over tips with the tacit agreement he’ll keep mum. She waits until the driver rounds the corner before starting in the direction of the apartment, scouts the side streets for flashing lights.

 

Her wrist is throbbing under Richie’s improvised bandage, and she curses him for being a jinx, knows it is all in her head, self-fulfilling prophecy. She unlocks the common door, trudges up the dank staircase to the landing with each step sagging under her feet. She sways a little at the top step, steadies herself on the railing. _‘Leave me standing, my ass.’_

 

She sets the bowling bag on the kitchen counter, then completes a wary turn about the apartment.

 

She’s washing her hands when the burner phone vibrates from the outer pocket of the bowler bag. It’s Seth, and when she picks it up, he skirts greetings, shouts plan C into the receiver, hangs up. She pulls the SIM card from the back of the burner phone, smashes it with an empty coffee mug.

 

Just the necessities, then. Few shirts and a pair of pants and everything else very replaceable. She is surprised how replaceable her life has become. She accumulates memories of a place and leaves them behind like a shrine or a gravestone, a testament to her fleeting presence there, a shape in space given meaning by the accumulation of meaningless trinkets.

 

Seth’s room is a study in stream of consciousness, no definable rhyme or reason to the placement of things. He was like that when they were running through Mexico, just collapsing on the first bed in sight and everything around him following gravity, luck, the stochasticity of existence. Drawers in his dresser each opened some half-measure, and she’s stuffing whatever looks clean into a duffel, tosses in several ammo boxes, .454s for Seth, nines for Richie, .38 specials for her.

 

She drops Seth’s duffel by the front door on the way to Richie’s room. He already has a go-bag at the end of the bed, and she starts to lift it, pauses, remembers the last time they used plan C and he forgot his sketchbook in the nightstand. All his private plans and ideas available for some stranger’s viewing pleasure, he said, and he pouted for days after that. He’d outlined future heists in that book, some down to the letter, some he couldn’t recreate on the fly, and watching him try to retrace the steps in his head while every other odd thing was swimming around in that cryptic noggin of his, she figures might as well be overcautious, Murphy’s law.

 

She opens the drawer to his nightstand and sure enough his sketchbook is the first thing she sees, knife-sharpened pencil secured under the elastic band and scraps of paper sticking out of the sides. There’s a half empty pack of Red Apples, and she catches the glint of his silver Zippo peeking from the rear of the drawer. As her hand reaches into the far back of the drawer to hook the lighter, her fingertips brush something soft. She thinks for a moment he probably keeps a gun stashed in his nightstand wrapped in oil cloth. After she pulls the lighter and pack of cigarettes out of the way, her hand dives back into the drawer, pinches the cloth, pulls expecting more weight, but her hand comes out into the light holding a neatly folded pair of cotton panties. She drops them suddenly as if burned.

 

“You little freak,” she whispers, partially disgusted, moderately intrigued, mostly curious. It doesn’t surprise her too much that Richie would keep something like that tucked in a hidden corner next to his bed. But then she feels a wash of nostalgia, a hint of recognition tickling. She pinches a piece of the fabric between thumb and forefinger, lifts it for closer inspection. They’re cute, bikini cut, white with pink piping and printed with cartoon pandas practicing karate. She had a pair just like these years ago, remembers packing them in Bethel after her father announced they were hitting the road in that shit-piece Winnebago. At some point, they disappeared, but a lot of things disappeared on that trip. “You little freak,” she sighs out again.

 

Her mind tumbles into a rabbit hole. Did he have them burning a hole in his pocket that afternoon by the pool, sitting at the kitchen table in the Winnebago when she reached for his hand to pray, in the backroom at the Twister? Watching her play mouse to his cat courting a trophy he hadn’t won yet. Her thoughts skip over that part, shove it into a dark corner the same way he kept a piece of her hidden in his nightstand drawer.

 

She debates leaving behind Richie’s sketchbook, debates setting it on fire with his Zippo and using the burning pages to smoke the rest of his cigarettes. Settles for the moral high ground like a sucker.

 

She’s like Richie. She keeps a jam bag tucked under her bed, always ready to make herself scarce. She hides his sketchbook and her underwear in the front pocket.

 

In the living room, she hops up on the coffee table, stands tiptoe and edges her fingers over the lip of the ceiling light cover, latches onto the keys to the Nova. It’s a struggle back down the stairs, but she manages to march the whole way to the Chevy without stopping. Kate scans the parking lot, drops the bags on the tar black next to the car, pulls off the vehicle cover. She deposits everything but the bowling bag in the trunk. One of the things Seth taught her after they pulled off their first heist together – always keep the score on your person. He drove that point home. "Tucked in your Fruit-of-the-Looms if you have to."

 

The bowling bag riding shotgun, she raises the Nova from the dead after sitting flaccid for the last five weeks. Her guts clench, reminding her of the first time she felt the rumble of the cougar’s V-8 under her thighs, palms gripping at the leather. For a moment, she thinks about what it would be like if Richie fucked her in the backseat while the engine idled, filling her up as Seth brought them from zero to sixty in under nine seconds.

 

The underwear incident, feeding Richie, it’s fucking with her head. She shifts into reverse, peals out of the parking spot and seamlessly switches into first, expertly transitions between the clutch and accelerator as she raises the ante into second, third, heads for the 95-southbound onramp. “You’re a lousy lay, Vegas.”

 

* * *

 

 

She makes it to Needles before dusk, parks under the awning next to the front office of the 66 motel. Leather bowling bag slung across her shoulder, she taps the front desk bell once, waits a beat, taps again, again. There’s a plate of chocolate chip cookies next to the guestbook with a sign that says welcome.

 

“Go ahead, sugar.” A middle-aged man comes out from behind the wall, slides the plate in front of her. “My wife bakes them for the guests. They’re here every day at five, straight from the oven. Only caveat is you gotta sign the guestbook.”

 

“Thank you,” Kate says to the first bright spot of her day.

 

He notices the cross dangling from her neck and smiles pleased. “Not many young people around here know the Lord,” he laments. “Not many young people today keep God close.”

 

 “My father was a pastor.”

 

“So, you were raised in the faith. And you’ve kept it?” he presses.

 

“As well as I can,” she admits.

 

He nods slowly, understanding. “At least you’re honest. But, I know it’s true for us all,” he agrees. “Well, young lady, are you traveling alone?”

 

“Um, no,” she starts. “I’m with my brothers. They’re getting in late, though. They were invited to give a sermon in Laughlin,” she explains.

 

“Itinerant preachers? That’s a dying breed.” He peers out behind her at the Nova parked under the awning, raises his eyebrows. “That’s some serious heat you’re driving.”

 

“Our father was into classic cars,” she returns easily, the lies flowing like dope into a well-tapped vein, and each lie makes the man more and more placid, docile. “Mister, I’ve been looking forward to sleeping in a bed tonight and not the back of my brother’s church van.”

 

He holds up his hands. “Say no more, miss. Here I am talking your ear off when you look dead on your feet. Old habits die hard, running a motel on this here the mother road and looking forward to hearing people’s stories. Two queens do okay for you and your brothers?”

 

“Yes,” she says relieved. “Yes, thank you. Do you take cash?” He doesn’t seem surprised itinerant preachers would operate outside of the banks and tells her it is no problem.

 

She hands him three twenties, and he takes the cash, types at the keyboard, peers at the monitor that looks like some relic from the Reagan. “I’ll give your brothers an extra key once they get here. You look like you need some sleep.”

 

“Thank you, mister.”

 

“My name’s not mister, sugar,” he corrects genially. “It’s Lionel.”

 

“I’m Kate, Kate Skerritt.” Her mother’s maiden name. “Lionel, just in case there aren’t any cookies left when my brothers get in, do you mind if I take a few extra?”

 

“Of course.” He pushes the plate closer to her. “You kids are doing God’s work. It’s the least I could do.”

 

She pulls the Nova up to room six, pops the trunk, and hauls everything at once into the motel, uninterested in making two stops. Her wrist is killing her.

 

She claims the bed farthest from the door, then screens the entire room, opening every drawer and window. Satisfied, she hooks the chain on the front door. Taking a seat on the bed with her jam bag in her lap, she unzips the front pocket and pulls out Richie’s sketchbook, her panda panties. Five minutes later and she is losing a staring contest with these offending things, **things** , nibbling at her cookie and obsessively opening, lighting, and snuffing Richie’s Zippo. Her wrist throbs, and when she looks at it, the puncture wounds are swollen and purpling. She thinks he is always so careful, but maybe losing sixty grams of bullet weight in all the wrong places made him careless. It wasn’t like he took a shot to the head, at least not this time around.

 

“Fuck, Richie,” she whines. “You creep.” She drops the lighter, the cookie on the bedspread, and hesitantly picks up the panties, more worn than she remembers. They’re soft; there’s no lewd suggestive inconsistencies in their texture, and he must wash them after, or maybe he never makes them messy. Maybe he just likes pressing that little patch that rests over her slit right up against his face, inhaling deep and hoping to catch some remnant of her while he beats off.

 

Kate exhales roughly and stares up at the ceiling, shakes her head. The clock reads six thirty, and she has no idea when the brothers Gecko will come barreling through that door, if they’ll make it that far.  

 

* * *

 

 

She’s running warm water over the two puncture wounds in her wrist when the motel room door jiggles. Someone battles with the old lock, tries to ram the key into an unyielding hole. She places fresh gauze over the wound, eyes the snub-nosed S&W next to the kitchenette sink with the barrel pointed towards the motel room door.

 

The key forces the lock to make space, and she hears all the little clicks and creaks as the lock resists. They jerk the key, twist the knob, and the door catches against the chain. “Christ, let me in,” he gripes, his nose peeking through the crack.

 

“Un momento,” she calls back. Her little canine rips into the bandage packaging, spits out a fragment that comes off, and goes back to worrying at the plastic while she meanders over to the door. He impatiently closes and opens the door again, the chain straining. She shoves the door closed, hears it clock him in the forehead. Her free hand unhooks the chain, and she reaches for the doorknob, but he’s already barreling in, shouldering around her to get to the bathroom. He slams the bathroom door behind him. She’s curious if culebras piss blood but figures it’s impolite to ask.

 

When he comes out of the bathroom wiping his hands on a towel, he opens with, “You told him we were itinerant preachers?”

 

 “I got you a cookie.” She walks up and offers it to him.

 

He tosses the towel behind him to land somewhere in the bathroom, accepts the cookie, takes a bite. She licks the grease and crumbs from her fingers, feels him watching. “When he asked me what the sermon was about, Seth made some excuse to bring the car round, left me with my dick in my hands,” Richie goes on, chewing cookie, talking with his mouth full. She starts wrapping the bandage around her wrist, listens. “Then, I realized how many fucking verses I’ve got in the chamber. It’s no surprise when I eat you all I pick up are bible quotes. Are you trying to convert me?”

 

She sighs, tucks the end of the bandage under the wrappings along her wrist, flexes her fingers to make sure the dressing isn’t too tight. “Not intentionally,” she reassures him, reaching up and swiping a smudge of chocolate off his upper lip, slips her thumb between her lips and lets him watch her little pink tongue lick it off. “And not to the church.”

 

He knows something is up, but he hasn’t pinpointed it yet. He searches the room for a hint. “Where’s Seth?” she wonders, and he gruffly tells her ‘food’ without looking at her, his gaze roving over every detail in the room, missing the one right under his nose.

 

“Is this a habit now?” he asks, gesturing at her level of undress, nothing but tank top and panties, sans bra. Seth used to joke you could tell a woman was hot for you based on the angle of her hips, her tits. If the lower set of eyes was fixed on you, green light means go. Richie allows himself a generous onceover, his palms itching to cradle her appealing little hip bones in sharp relief before the flare of her bare thighs, something to hold onto. His eyes pretend to look at her cross, but he glances southward, nearly tells them to stop staring.   

 

“What?” she returns innocently, turning away, showing him the view. “It’s hot.”

 

“Walking around half-naked when Seth isn’t around?”

 

She mulls it over while making her way to the bed. His sketchbook lies open atop the bedspread. She answers facing away, “Are you saying I should share the view?”  

 

Seeing the two images overlapping, the bed, her bare legs, he closes his eyes, refocuses, opens them again. He keeps talking while staring at her ass, trying to figure something out, an idea, realization scratching at him. “No one said that,” he starts, but spies his sketchbook in her hands and it clicks in his head, his train of thought trailing into alarm. His mouth is open, but no more words make their way through; he motions for an excuse, snags his tongue on it. He settles for, “Why are you wearing those?”

 

“They’re mine, aren’t they?” she contends.

 

His gaze flickers back and forth between the sketchbook and her legs, her ass, the space of fabric where he’s lost himself. “Thanks for remembering my sketchbook.” He’s trying to figure out a way to ask for them back, the panda panties, even while she has his sketchbook hostage.

 

“I’m good like that, aren’t I, Richie?” She flips through the pages, interprets the diagrams of different safe models, his scribbles in the margins for best approaches. “Picking up the slack,” she says, trailing off, transfixed for a moment by a sketch of a nude female torso with candy skull pasties, dissected from sternum to pubic bone, and snakes slithering from her guts.

 

Distracted by the cartoon panda practicing a round kick just above her clit, he hears the strike of the flint, and it doesn’t register until suddenly his sketchbook is in flames. “Shit!” He crosses the room in three strides, snatches the sketchbook from her hands, and she doesn’t put up a fight, clicking the Zippo closed. He throws it down on the carpet, stamps it out.

 

“You take something, you lose something,” she figures, tosses him his Zippo. He catches it against his chest, staring down at what’s left of his sketchbook.

 

He leaves his sketchbook on the carpet, takes a seat in the armchair by the curtained window. Before he can fish out the pack of cigarettes in his suit jacket, she corners him, her stance wide when she slides her hand inside his suit jacket, fingers finding purchase on the pack of Red Apples. He thinks she’s going to produce a cigarette for him, opens his lighter, but she crushes the pack in her hands, drops it to the floor.

 

“I like you mean,” he admits, snapping the Zippo closed with a tinny chime. “Should I repent?”

 

“Do you know what you’re repenting for?” she wonders, eyeing his Zippo, thinking about taking that too, taking everything, glasses, clothes, shoving her arm down that monster gullet and ripping the snake from his belly.

 

“Making Jesus cry?” he tries. She rolls her eyes. “Do you ever make Jesus cry?” he wonders. He’s been inside her too many times. He’s picking up more than bible quotes. “Did Kyle ever ring Satan’s doorbell?”

 

She feeds him some bull, “I rang twice before you got here.”

 

He tilts his face up, the edge of his ridiculous Buddy Holly horn rims knocking her temple. His lips shape the word ‘liar’, drawing the word out so she can watch it roll silent over his tongue.

 

She places her knee next to his on the seat cushion, slides her body forward. Crossing her arms behind his neck, she settles her ass over his lap, her hipbones pressing into his belt. “Come on, Richie,” she appeals. “I’ve picked up the slack; I’ve given you all the magic words.” She tilts her hips forward and grinds down once.

 

He gets a handle on her, keeps her still, controls his exhale. “Making me into something you want,” he figures.

 

She tilts her forehead into his, small pleased smile so close to his mouth he wants to lick it off, make her messy. “You’ve never had to work very hard at it.” It’s as good an admission he'll ever get.

 

He spreads his hands along the curve of her ass, stands up with her pelvis pressed to his belt buckle, about-faces to set her in the chair.

 

She huffs, exasperated. “Do you need a road map?”

 

He gets down on his knees, pleads patience. “You wanted me to repent.” He spreads her knees to make room for him, slides his hands up the length of her legs from ankle to the junction of her thighs. His fingers slip under the elastic waistband of her panties, peeling them down, and she has to raise her hips.

 

“Give them back,” she protests when he already has them free of her ankles.  

 

He shakes his head, keeps his hand curled over one hipbone to hold her in place while he slips her panties into his back pocket, out of sight, out of mind. He figures he has partial ownership by now.

 

“They were my favorite.”

 

He gives her a look that says he knew as he hooks her leg over his shoulder. He nuzzles his cheek along the inside of one downy thigh, cants his mouth to the side and lets his teeth graze where the mid-groove disappears, feels the muscles jump, watches her gut clench.

 

His mouth between her legs, each slide of his tongue a prayer, atoning, her loyal supplicant. Her toes crawl along his thigh to reward him, curl inward, edge toward where's he's straining against the bridge of his pants, her heel curving over his dick, pulls her bottom lip between her teeth when she senses the heat against the ball of her foot. His hand catches her foot, thumb pressing into her arch, and she jerks, ticklish, the movement throwing him off kilter, his shoulder knocking her knee. His tongue loses focus briefly before he closes his mouth completely over her cunt, a firm seal, and his tongue inside her. Her back arches away from the seat back, and she's pressing her caught foot into his hand looking for leverage. His free hand splays along her belly, slides up and takes the hem of her tank top with it, his fingers brushing against her sternum. She inhales sharply, her chest expanding, exhales rough and her breast sinks down into his palm as all the air leaves her.

 

It’s stronger, headier, he thinks. Before it was only vestiges, memories of her pretty, untouched – he groans against her cunt, teeth dragging lightly over her clit, and she keens, thigh tense along his shoulder blade. He kneads her small breast, releases her foot, grabs her bird-bone ankle so he can coax her to hook the other leg over his shoulder.

 

The sound that she makes, like she’s about to give up the ghost, her little death against his mouth, and he knows he is going to leave bruises on her tits, her ribs, the inside of her thighs.

 

Her shuddering laugh twists his insides, and her hand kneads his shoulder, worries the fabric of his suit between her nails painted shell pink like her pussy, glossy like the perfect mimic. She unconsciously slides the heel of her foot up and down his shoulder blade, and he shifts his legs around the discomfort between his thighs, licks his lips, nearly reaches down to try and marginally satisfy. Her eyes closed then lids lifting languidly, blissed out, pupils blown. “You’re forgiven.”

 

She’s his judgment. Seth told him about Jacob Fuller proclaiming the Brothers Gecko his family’s final judgment, and they might have been for the disgraced pastor, but it was always the other way around with Katie-Cakes. The bar was set with her. Richie didn’t believe in God, and when she reached for his hand in the back of the Winnebago, green eyes clear and free of scrutiny, his heart had skipped with unease as she let him take her small hand in his, beckoning him to close his eyes, trust her.

 

She lunges out of the chair then, knocks him onto his back. He break-falls, but her thighs are flanking his hips quick, painting the bridge of his pants with the leftovers of her orgasm. When she grinds her pelvis against him, her wet slit directly over his hard on, and he can feel the heat between her legs, the damp making it through his slacks, he knocks his head back into the floor while her teeth worry his jawline. He knows how easy it would be to just break the bridge of his pants, make it the short reachable distance. How many times did he jerk off with those puerile panties pressed to his nose, imagining her bouncing on his dick, finding that perfect friction between his pubic bone and her clit, the small golden cross around her neck dangling in time to her thrusts?

 

They don’t hear the key in the door, the subsequent struggle mirroring hers, his earlier with that cheap rusting motel lock. Seth manages to jam the key in, curses, shoves the door open but it catches on the chain.

 

“Fuck me,” Seth gripes through the opening between the door and the frame. Kate kisses him, tastes herself, mouths Seth’s words against his bottom lip, and he has both her hands in his, trying to peel them off his lapels. “Little help?”

 

Richie untangles her fingers from his shirt, and she murmurs complaints against his Adam’s apple, rocking her hips into his as he sits up. He hisses, she sees the word _serpent_ in her mind, sees Richie when she brings their eyes level. “I like you repentant,” she whispers against his mouth. A suggestion, “Perhaps self-flagellation next?”

 

He swallows, presses his tongue to back of his teeth to keep it from sliding into her mouth. Seth bangs on the door, the chain straining against the frame, and it’s only a matter of time before his brother decides to kick the whole thing in. Richie’s hands unconsciously tilt her hips into his, her pelvis applying pleasing pressure, nearly satisfying, and she hums her assent. Another roll of her hips, and he groans, knocks his forehead into hers and lines up the bridges of their noses, hers an upturned button and he wants to bite the tip of it.

 

“Open the fucking door,” Seth complains, his face pressed whining to the small opening, leaning his whole body into the door.

 

He drops his head, and she exhales disappointed. She stands up, and her pussy is level with his face, bare inches he could just – she steps over him, and he grabs her unbitten wrist. “Next time,” he promises. “I’ll let you watch.” He releases her, but she stays there for a moment looking down at him, contemplating it. Then a shift in her expression – looking forward to it.

 

Kate shimmies into a pair of shorts from her jam bag, gives Richie a glance that says he needs to get up off the floor. He looks too strung out and bothered sprawled there by the chair with a wet spot on the bridge of his slacks, sporting a hard-on she imagines would drive better men to massacre. He makes it to the bathroom before she gets to the front door, unlatches the chain. Seth bounding in with a greasy paper bag and a kiss on her cheek for a job well done when Richie leans over the tub to switch the faucet on.

 

The shower running, he plays another oldie but goldie seated on the motel toilet with her panda panties pressed to his nose, the scent heavier, more potent, fresher, and his dick in his hand. There’s steam hovering near the ceiling, filling up all the spaces, easing into him, bleeding sweat, and he thinks snakes don’t sweat. He hears her laugh at one of Seth’s jokes and his pace quickens, remembers that shivering laugh he could feel against his tongue buried in her pussy _. ‘You play with me, and I’ll play with you.’_ He grinds his teeth, tastes her bittersweet on his tongue.

 

 _‘You won’t understand the meaning of term until you’ve been played with by me,’_ she whispers through the steam, tugging him over the edge, and he bites the patch of fabric still damp from her, the knot in his gut unraveling and her keening ringing in his ears.

 

Yeah, she’ll do more than just watch next time.


	3. drag me over the rainbow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whole skit is the trio watching the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in a motel room while waiting out the heat following a score. Ends in some good old-fashioned naughty. Title from a Neil Young song, Down by the River. Disclaimer for all the foul language.

Richie eyes the fan spinning lazily above their heads, squeaking angry against its anchors, and he knows all it would take is a few tweaks with a screwdriver and some WD-40 to make it happy. He tips the bottle back and takes another swig of Corona, gets a bit of lime pulp from the slice wedged in the bottleneck, licks at the foam frothing over. Seth hit too many potholes on the way back from the liquor store, and all the beers have big heads.

 

Seth keeps trying to find the right angle with the remote to lower the volume just right, curses each time. “Piece of shit.” He gets the volume, but Kate mumbles she can’t hear it, turn on the subtitles, and he maneuvers the remote again to activate closed captioning even though she’s already nodding off.

 

Richie keeps his ears peeled to the police radio sitting on the table by the window, screening each code and street over the San Bernardino County scanner, perched on the possibility of Gecko springing up on the feed. Seth’s chronic tinnitus, a byproduct of their lifestyle, can barely pick up the high pitch of the dispatcher’s voice.

 

Seth tosses the remote on the bed at their feet and settles into the three pillows propping him up, pops open a foamy beer on the nightstand. He reaches over and clinks it on Richie’s before turning his attention to the tube.

 

Kate has her arms draped over Richie’s lap, her head resting against one thigh, and one of her legs stretched along Seth’s, her foot curled over his calf. She can barely keep her eyes open as the bounty hunters enter the scene, a dusty stopover in the middle of some New Mexico desert. The three men barrel into the trading post, shots fired, and some rough-n-ready comes bursting through the window ham-fisting a drumstick with a pistol in the other.

 

Seth snorts, swigs his beer. Richie perks up when he hears a familiar street name, somewhere five blocks from the motel, but the police code doesn’t match up.

 

“See, look at that shit, you can see the tower right over Van Cleef’s fucking shoulder? It’s piss-poor directing,” Richie complains, pointing his beer at the screen.

 

Seth forgot how awful his brother gets during movies, nitpicky, distracted by every anachronism and continuity SNAFU. “Richie, just enjoy the movie. It’s one of your favorites.” Seth reaches for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, and Kate snuffles, disturbed, buries her cheek into Richie’s thigh. She’s already down for the count, and Seth figures if they do end the night with the cops picking up their scent, he’ll have to carry her to the cougar.

 

“Leone is all about attention to detail, and he can’t even doublecheck his shots.” Richie sticks his finger into the beer bottleneck, shoves the lime slice down into the glass, licks his fingers.

 

Kate pushes up on her elbows, stares at his beer, and he tips the bottle towards her lips, gives her a swig while labeling her a mooch. Her head swivels towards the screen. “Why are they talking out of sync?” Their lips don’t match the audio, the subtitles.

 

Richie tells her the director was Italian and the film was shot in Italy with mostly Italian actors. The whole film is spoken in Italian, but the audio is in English, so all the audio is actually English voiceovers. She reasons that Clint Eastwood is an American actor and even his lines are off. “He came in and did the voiceover for his own lines, but it doesn’t mean his mouth is gonna match,” Richie explains. Kate watches for a little bit more, hurts her head trying to mentally line up the audio with the action. Richie tells her its best not to look at their mouths. It’s Sergio Leone, so it’s not important, the mouths. He suggests she focus on their eyes, but she slides off the bed and stumbles towards the bathroom.

 

She leaves the bathroom door open, watches the screen from the toilet with her panties around her ankles and her elbows balanced on her knees. The boys can’t see her from around the corner anyway.

 

Seth bends a match back from the book, lights it off his thumb, and Richie catches the pungent smell of white phosphorus, watches his brother spread the flame over the end of his fresh cigarette. “Sausage fest,” Seth notes, taking a drag and passing the cigarette to Richie. “At least in Wayne’s movies you got some good-looking broad to come mess things up.”

 

Richie takes a drag, French inhales, and passes it back. “You had Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time.”

 

Seth snorts, nods. “I don’t know how she didn’t tip over with those things.” Richie agrees.

 

The toilet flushes, and Kate comes sauntering back out, crawls across the mattress over Richie’s legs like a housecat, and takes back her spot between them, cheek flat on Richie’s thigh, tiny toes twinkling on Seth’s calf. Seth runs one finger up her arch, and she kicks in the side of his knee, chastising.

 

Kate dozes off. Several times she wakes up and the movie is still going, beer bottles lined up on their respective nightstands, butts piling in ashtrays. She hears bits and pieces of their added commentary.

 

“Dude’s fucking spry for no legs. Look at him go!”

 

“I call bullshit. Man wouldn’t look like that after thirty miles in the desert.”

 

“Only made it what halfway? Fuck, Tuco made it seventy just fine.”

 

* * *

 

All of them live inside her. And people like Seth and her brother can say it was nothing but subservience, an inherent need to subject themselves to a higher power, to feed their faith somewhere. But, she knows better. They loved her. And despite the distance wrought by her crown, she adored them all in her own way.

 

She dreams of two men.

 

One with an eye in his left palm, _sinister_ , hand of the serpent, his voice like pins in a voodoo doll, targeting the heart of things, a collector of tricks begat by blood.

 

The other with a star housed in his right hand, _dexter_ , the hand of God, who preaches with her father’s conviction, loves her just as much, his whole existence to be her bulwark, her pedestal, her sun god.

 

Kate can see things more clearly now. Parts of the hell goddess are left inside her like shrapnel, tenacious bits of flak she never quite managed to extract, much like the red in her hair that never fades. So there is vestigial hatred and the thirst for retribution and control, but she was made of more than all the big bad uglies, because hell and heaven, they are everything, two sides of the same coin in constant tension with one another. Hell and heaven, mirages, like the space between sea and horizon bleeding. At a certain point, one cannot tell the difference, and that is how she feels inside Kate. A tension with something that is her, fundamentally her but not.

 

 _Loyal like a dog_. Richie says it in contempt, sneering, and it is easy for someone whose loyalty is as fickle as the weather.

 

“You’re self-serving as all hell, and more often than not I hate myself for wanting you,” she admits finally, to herself, to no one else. 

 

It’s blatant blasphemy, but she learned to enjoy his adoration, his devotion, his worship. Their faith was born from fact, though, the tangibility of her, a force that could be felt not just sensed. The heart of faith is uncertainty, she knows, but there was never a flicker of skepticism in his eyes. Her sun god, his faith never wavered. And, she misses it sometimes. It was the first and last time Kate ever felt she had control and the ability to exercise her control, to move pawns instead of falling prey to the machinations and manipulations of others, master instead of slave, to the Lords, the Geckos, her brother, to God. But, it wasn’t her. She could feel the control, but she could not sense it from herself, from what made her Kate.

 

In the beginning, she thought she was no better than a passing fancy, a paper doll, a transient voyeur getting a peek at the Gecko inner workings. But, it didn’t happen that way, not like a little sister begging to tag along. It was assumed. They brought her back. Seth burned her clothes and Richie wiped the makeup away, and she imagined they were trying to atone, taking some half-assed measure of responsibility for her, considering the origin and conclusion of her misfortune always came with a Gecko caveat. She assumed it was atonement.

 

After a while, she felt she belonged to them. It was seamless, how easily she settled between them. And so, if it wasn’t atonement, perhaps it was compensation, not to her but between themselves, a compromise. They’d reached their limits with each other. There was nothing left to learn from one another and neither was willing to endure a partnership under either’s thumb. She was something for them to focus on instead of competing with one another, a young thief to mold, a protégé to hone.

 

She’s so tired of being the nail. She wants to be the hammer.

 

 _He was no better than a procurer for you_. The eye in his hand swivels in its socket, angling for the best view, taking it all in, electric blue and manic and hungry.

 

“There was nothing he was bad at,” she muses. The sun god kneels head bowed before her, his right hand gloved as a show of deference. He removes his sunglasses so she can see he has nothing to hide from her; he is hers. Her heart is tender for him, and it is not just hers, not just Kate’s. The hell goddess loved him, not like a pet or a servant, but a confidant, a transdimensional trust weathering centuries of espionage and coups and the gory details of succession.

 

 _Making me into something you want_. Richie’s hands on her hips deciding, caught between a push and a pull like the steady state of gravity. Objects do not orbit but fall perpetually and never quite hit their mark, and that’s where they end up, falling towards one another but never rounding for home. It’s not a nine-millimeter in his trousers this time. It’s nature she subconsciously nurtured. It’s chemical fate.

 

“You’ve always been what I wanted, but I was too afraid to ask. It was wrong to ask.”

 

 _Sacrilege._ She watches the word pass through his monster mouth, and whispers to herself, “It’s a sin.”

 

The sun god never told her not to want. Her thirst was his thirst, her appetites and demands his favorite pastime, and none was too taboo. He nurtured not just the worst in her but all the rest, too.

 

And hasn’t that been the running theme of Kate’s life? An interminable string of noes, a prayer for every misdeed, every craving quelled, every dirty thought expunged. She continued to make excuses for herself even as the remaining Fullers piled into the RV, grasping at the vestiges of her faith. Even then it was only residual piety, a flimsy protection spell against the big bad uglies that started to pile up around her.

 

He saw it in her that day by the pool, all her excuses bleeding out of her, the glue of her faith dissolving in the chlorine, shaken and knowing nothing would be the same again. She was flayed open then and the Geckos took advantage. Richie tiptoeing around her prayers, her appeals for freedom, her half-hearted dares; Seth revving the ‘vette and leading her on a wild goose chase through the sweaty holes of Mexico, promising her a partnership, making her into a poor substitute. Both dragging her further into the mess of their lives, like dogshit on the bottom of her shoe.

 

She still makes excuses. She still blames them. And it may have been their fault initially, making her family into the collateral damage from Santanico’s vendetta, but she clawed her way out of the temple sans a father and a brother and she had a choice. She could’ve gone home. Would it have been any more painful than what came to pass instead?

 

Because she needed it. Something had surfaced from where she’d been flayed, and she can chalk it up to feeling some measure of responsibility for Scott, an adherence to her father’s last wish, but something else was sick of excuses. Something else knew there was no home to go back to. The Gecko brothers shouldered their way into her life, planted tethers in the space where she was flayed beneath her sternum, and she could dig in her heels and keep making excuses, cry martyr, or she could fall seamlessly into the madness and mayhem of their lives.

 

There was a clear before and a clear after. There was no transition, no easing into it. It was a cold plunge and she had plenty of potential exits to take. She can still get off at the next exit. She nurtured enough of the best of herself. Now, she needs all the rest.

 

* * *

 

“Look at that dumbass wasting all the hooch down his face,” Richie gripes, signaling for his brother to fork over the lit cigarette while keeping his eyes peeled to the screen. Another code goes over the radio, domestic violence.

 

Seth sighs, gives him the cigarette. “Leave it to you to tear down a good thing.”

 

Richie tokes, blows a couple smoke rings. “All I’m saying is if you take pride in your work, don’t be so fucking lazy with the details.” He argues with the screen, pointing the lit end of the cigarette at the scene. “Jesus, hit him with the fucking chair. Thought Tuco had more nut than that.” He scoffs disappointed, passes the cigarette back to his brother. Kate doesn’t so much as flinch when he raises his voice, jumps during a scene, shares beer and cigarettes with his brother, her mouth open against his thigh and he can feel a wet spot forming there. Occasionally she’ll reflexively curl her nails into the meat of his thigh, presses and pulls and mindlessly mumbles.

 

Seth reaches over and brushes a strand of hair out of her face. “All tuckered out,” he says fondly. “Pretty sure she’s drooling all over your leg, though.”

 

Her position awkward, cheek pressed to his thigh but lying on her stomach. Richie gently adjusts her torso, cradling her head as he maneuvers her more onto her side, eases some of the tension off her neck and shoulders. “Not the first time,” he murmurs more to himself. She subconsciously brushes at his hand curved around the nape of her neck, grumbles and curls in on herself.

 

Seth chuckles, takes a pull off his beer. And then Richie notices the scars on Seth’s throat tattooed over, partially erased, obscured by those tacky black flames crawling up his neck. He doesn’t think when he reaches over, presses his index and middle finger to the two perfectly circular indents in his brother’s neck, like two little moons in his olive skin. Seth flinches, but he knows his brother has no feeling there anymore, not in those tiny epicenters where Richie skirted the lines of familial fidelity while the snakes circled.

 

One clear green eye pops open, peering up at him, catching on the fingers of his left hand brushing the puncture marks on his brother’s throat. _You were gonna turn him_ , her accusing voice echoing in his ears. _You wanted to_. Richie pulls his fingers off Seth’s throat and lays his hand over her eyes instead.

 

And his brother looks at him in the same way for the hundredth time – the same way he looked at him after he came from the bathroom with the bank teller, after he intimated to Seth his suspicions about the two girls in Benny’s Liquor Store, after Seth found the bank teller’s body in the motel room. Surprised that his brother was a crazy fuck but obligated nonetheless, and couldn’t Richie always count on that like a Swiss watch telling time.

 

Richie leans over Kate and whispers in her ear, his left palm laid over her eyes. “Go back to sleep.” The eye is hidden, but she falls asleep anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

In her head, the sky looks bluer when Seth is around, true blue. It’s always red and setting when Richie is skulking around, black velvet and stars, acid aquamarine like something radioactive, like the burning cold of the high desert. But, Seth is like the lowland deserts, hot and sharp and imaginary steam rising up off the ground, burning through everything like a Roman candle, and the stark landscape always contrasting so distinctly against the sterile blue overhead.

 

And she the rolling hills outside Tehachapi in spring, twisted trees punctuating the landscape and carpets of wildflowers, lupine and poppies and Indian paintbrush, predictably but fleetingly beautiful. Hills dotted with dozens of turbines like guards, like the statues on Easter Island, like her Xibalban middlemen.

 

She’s sitting in the bitch seat of the Chevy Nova they ditched outside Bakersfield two months ago. Seth is in the driver’s seat, his legs sprawled out under the dash, resting his lead foot. His right arm is slung along the seat cushion, her head nestled in the crook of his elbow.

 

Richie’s pacing back and forth across the view from the windshield barking into the mobile’s receiver. He’s lit up by the Nova’s headlights, and it sharpens his features, very Jack Torrance. She cannot imagine the harsh glare on his glasses. He eventually takes them off and slides them into his suit jacket pocket.

 

She notices how bad Richie’s posture is, his shoulders hunched up, neck hanging just slightly like he’s always held by the scruff. She thinks maybe he does it because his brother likes to grab him there, sometimes to reassure him, sometimes to give him an order, sometimes to get a handle so he can drive his knee up into Richie’s gut. But, she knows tall guys have notoriously bad posture, that it’s born more from habit, ducking under doorways, conscious of the ceiling, leaning down to hear better, and she figures that’s why Richie liked living in big open spaces. And maybe that’s why he leans down to listen to her or Seth only half the time; the other half he’d rather not hear.

 

“You’re letting him discuss the fence for once?” she wonders, manipulating an apple in her hands. There’s a mesh bag filled with Red Delicious in the backseat that Seth bought from a street vendor at the turnoff from the 58.

 

Seth drums his fingers on the seat cushion next to her shoulder. “Gotta give an inch to get a mile, princess.” 

 

“Well, he’s fucking it up.”

 

Richie starts dictating, holding the phone forward, no longer listening to the other side. She can see his black suit jacket straining along his shoulders, the front button across his stomach barely holding.

 

Seth laughs and nods. “Yep, he’s fucking it up.” He’s just proving his perpetual point, poking more holes in Richie’s piss-poor people skills. Richie could plan a job, no question, but as far as rounding out their team with a reliable crew for the before, during, and after, Seth was better at buttering up the usual suspects while Richie always managed to eat one, either out of anger, hunger, or just plain annoyance.

 

“What are we gonna do then?” She kicks the bag at her feet filled with fifty grand worth of AEDs, chump change in the grand scheme of things.

 

“Patience, princess,” Seth reasons, curls his fingers around the smooth knob of her shoulder.

 

“No faith,” she whispers, realizing Seth has already deviated from the plan, predicting his brother would bungle the fence. He’s already made the call.

 

And Seth leans towards her, gimlet eyes devious and playful and smug. “Who needs faith when you have certainty?” He looks too pleased with himself, so she dips her head, nips his jawline, feels the scruff from his five o’clock shadow rough against her lips. He raises his eyebrows and smiles like he’s trying not to show teeth. Richie glances into the windshield, but he cannot see through the headlights. Doesn’t matter, she thinks. He knows.

 

Richie stops talking once he realizes the other side has hung up. He casually flips the phone closed and slides it into his pocket, retrieves his glasses. He comes around and slides back into the passenger seat, the car lurching a little with his weight, and slams the door closed. “He said to meet him at his bar on Wildhorse Road,” Richie lies, and she wonders why some guy who runs a bar in some armpit of California would be involved in black market trades for AEDs. Seth rolls his eyes, knows Richie is going to lead them into a fight calling it a negotiation, will makes excuses that he deals better ‘face-to-face’.

 

She calls him on his bullshit. “Leave it to you to tear apart a good deal.”

 

“The deal is still good.” She forgets sometimes how bad of a liar he can be, or maybe she’s learned all his tells by now. Lie or not, she doesn’t see the knife until he’s sticking the blade into her apple, stealing it out of her hands.

 

Seth reaches across her so quick, though, grabs the front of his brother’s shirt, and she doesn’t know what to do besides try to make herself small, avoid a stray swipe of Richie’s knife or a clip from Seth’s fist. But, Seth only shoves his brother back against the passenger seat. “Don’t take your shit out on her.”

 

Richie extricates his shirt from Seth’s grip, tosses his brother’s hand back across the car. “Relax, brother. Kate knows I was just playing.” The blade breaks apple skin, a crisp sound, and she can smell the insides now, sweet and fresh. “You don’t trust me, Kate?”

 

“Not as far as I can throw you.”

 

The knife passes through the apple, ends at his thumb, and he brings it to her mouth with the slice balanced on the blade. “We’ll have to remedy that.” She peers down her nose at the apple, the tip of the blade nipping her bottom lip. “Open wide, peaches.” His hand is as steady as a surgeon waiting patiently, and she raises her eyes to his as her lips close around the blade, her tongue testing the edge as she steals the apple away. There’s blood and apple on the back of her tongue, and she pulls away with her lips flush to the blade. “I’m not so bad,” he says with a smile that twists the pit of her stomach.

 

“Always up for debate,” his brother shoots across the cab.

 

* * *

 

 

“Are you saying I’m the ugly?” Seth contends, passing the cigarette.

 

Kate coos, digs her chin into Richie’s thigh and slides her knees up under her. She flips, lays her head across Richie’s lap with her legs flung across Seth’s. The two keep arguing as she gets comfortable.

 

“I mean, you are a mouth,” Richie reasons on the inhale. “And you’re short.”

 

“No, you’re just a fucking giant. I’m average.” Seth finishes his fifth beer.

 

“Don’t be raw, brother. Tuco’s got nut.” Richie’s fingers are carding through her hair absent-mindedly, and she murmurs sleepy, tilts her head back. He takes the last pull off the cigarette, stamps it out in the ashtray. “I really thought I was gonna make it.”

 

“To what?”

 

“John Wayne. Same height as Eastwood.”

 

Seth reaches over the side of the bed, pops open the cooler. He comes back round with two fresh beers, the glass dripping. “Jerked off too much and stunted your growth.”

 

Richie twists the top off both. “Pot meet kettle.”

 

Kate watches the beers pass over her head. “You have the same eyes.”

 

“What’s that, peaches?” Richie queries.

 

He offers her a pull from his beer, but she twists onto her side, rebuffs him. “That Van Cleef guy. Pretty eyes.”

 

Seth’s brow arches. “Angel Eyes dies in the end.”

 

“Spoiler,” Richie scolds, but Seth argues she isn’t even watching. “He was still pretty kick ass.”

 

Seth grumbles, “Fucking boxed-in one-note actor.”

 

* * *

 

 

There is a fundamental difference between the two of them where she is concerned. It took her a long moment to figure it out. One sets out to preserve her honor. The other sets out to preserve her honor for himself, and she can feel the contention between these two goals. One who tempers her flirtations and the other teasing them from her. For one it was never a question she needed to ask, and the other it’s a question she’s skirted for months now.

 

At least one of them has to have some sense of right and wrong, and he guards that twisted morality with a stamina she cannot match. She let it go for the longest time, because it was easier, safer. Seth somehow made her feel more secure. It was always a small comfort to know he was aware of her, held some modicum of concern for her wellbeing, that he cared she never had a prom or a high school graduation. Whereas with Richie she felt the moment he looked away, she would fall through some new trapdoor, following him around the labyrinth of her nightmares and losing him around the next corner, because he always seemed on the verge of something, one foot in another dimension and the other with her, with Seth.

 

But, she’s just the same now. Her soul’s been warped by possession, a part of her forever anchored in that other place, straddling dimensions in much the same way. And she dreams of rivers of blood and boiling pits of flesh and radioactive deserts in much the same way.

 

Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls into his bed, curls up at his side, her sacrum pressed to his hipbone. The nightmares don’t stutter his breathing like they do hers, though, and he can feel her shivering against his hip, so he lays his palm along the dip of her waist to dull the thrum of fear in her gut.

 

Once she’s asleep, his fingers search every place he’s ever bitten her, finds nothing but smooth skin. She’s still a living, breathing girl folded up next to him. He was slow to notice. She’d had a few close calls, a grazed bullet here, a trip and scrape there, and she’d clean it, wrap it up, but by the end of the next day, it’d be gone. She’d keep the bandage on longer to fool them.

 

It helps convince him she’ll survive the next round, the ones after that.

 

And sometimes she hides in Seth’s bed when he’s either too drunk or tired to care, to say no to her unsaid questions. She watches him fuss in his sleep, slack-mouthed, his neck craned the wrong way just begging for early morning aches and pains, and she adores him for it, the obvious humanity of him. Halfway through the night, she ends up clinging to Seth like a spider monkey, listening to the steady strumming of his heart, her temple fixed to his sternum. When she wakes up, he’s found shelter in the shower to remove the feel of her soft body pressed to his in all the right-wrong places.

 

She starfishes across the mussed-up sheets, staring up at the ceiling as Richie returns from a zero-hour feeding. Richie flattens himself out across the mattress, his head resting on her stomach, ear to her exposed belly-button as if listening to the sea through a shell. There’s a spray of blood along his starchy white collar, disappearing on the lapels of his black suit jacket.

 

“Stomach ache again?” she wonders, running her palm up the fade from nape to crown. He nods into her stomach like a little kid. She thinks she’s starting to spoil him on what’s passing through her veins, knows it is some heady combination of all the things she’s had slither through in conflict with her poorly guarded virtue, the hope at the bottom of her Pandora’s box like an odd aftertaste he’s still surprised to find. “Buy me breakfast first.”

 

He asks her what she wants just as Seth steps out from the steamy motel bathroom in a white undershirt and slacks with the bridge broken. She catches a peek of his treasure trail where the hem of his tee ends, her eyes trailing upwards in a generous onceover. “Blueberry pancakes.”

 

* * *

  

Kate fades out again, fades back in, feels Richie’s hand cool across her clavicle, Seth’s hot on her ankle.

 

“I can’t believe you think you’re the man-with-no-name.” Seth lights matches without purpose, his voice rough from chain smoking. They’re out of cigarettes.

 

“Cooler heads prevail, brother.” Richie nurses the last beer, shares it with Seth. “I’m saying you’re too twitchy to be the man-with-no-name. And you never miss a beating.”

 

Seth scoffs. “Fine by me. The man-with-no-name never gets any nookie. Sounds familiar.”

 

Richie steals the beer back. “He’s got a higher purpose.”

 

Kate stretches out, her back arching away from the ratty mattress. “What, the score?” Richie feeds her the last sip, mostly the brothers’ leftovers.

 

“But, that’s power,” Richie reasons, smirking, lining the empty bottle up with the others. “Ain’t gonna find an SOB with no name.”

 

“Awful lonely,” Kate figures, and the brothers share a look, such a chick thing to say.

 

“Leone could really get up his own ass,” Richie gripes, barely paying attention to the final showdown playing out on the tube. “He’s always gotta have like five climaxes.”

 

“Lucky Eastwood has star power.” Seth produces a pint of Jim Beam from somewhere beneath the bed. “At least Wayne, you know Ford and Hathaway, short and sweet and no lulls.” He twists the top off and offers Richie the first pull. She can tell Seth is trying not to slur his words, a sixer and a half of beer swimming in his empty belly.

 

“Searchers and True Grit were kind of long.” Richie takes a sip from the pint. He presses the lip of the bottle to her mouth, pours a jigger down her throat without warning, and she coughs, sputters, sits up suddenly. “Doesn’t she remind you of Kim Darby a little?”

 

“I’m right here.”

 

Seth gives her a onceover. “Yeah, a little. Not so much in the face.” He takes a swig from the Jim Beam while he mulls it over.

 

“Yeah, I didn’t mean the face obviously.”

 

“Little pistol but pious?”

 

“Perpetual baby face?”

 

“No tits.”

 

“Spankable ass.”

 

“You know she played a fourteen-year-old in that, creeps. And that pageboy was awful. Why can’t I be Katherine Ross?” The brothers share another look, and she wants to knock their skulls together, feels a little nostalgic for Scott, their sibling second language.

 

Richie slides off the bed to use the bathroom, and she sprawls out over the warm spot he’s left on the mattress.

 

She snaps her fingers at Seth. “Hey, Butch. You ever wonder if I’d met you first?” Her legs are draped over his, and she’s got red spots flaring up on the sides of her knees from where they were pressed to the bony spots of his own legs while she slept. He finds a space for the pint of Jim Beam on the nightstand, smiling to himself.

 

She’s wondering if he’s going to start answering questions tonight. Stops wondering as he slumps off his stack of pillows, pulls her towards him. He’s shelved his inhibitions for the evening when he guides her leg to hook over his hip and his other hand is buried in the hair at the nape of her neck.

 

She has thought about it, though. If Seth had fetched her instead of Richie, how she might have avoided that awful, soul-scraping poolside conversation, knowing Seth would have made it quick, shot straight for the point and herded her back to the motel room while carrying her stuff for her. On some alternate afternoon she never let Richie get inside her head and she followed a handsome gentleman thief up to her family’s room, feeling like a means to an end instead of unsuspecting prey. But maybe Scott wouldn’t have drawn on them at the checkpoint, because she never would have reached for Richie’s hand to pray. Maybe Scott would have taken the chance to pull on Richie after the checkpoint while Seth was driving, and her father would have gotten the opportunity to beat Seth bloody with the wrench, and because Richie had never been inside her head, she may have felt more entitled to grab his gun, end it all right there. Maybe then she’d still have a family, would have graduated high school, gone to prom, all the things Seth wanted for her after the fact. But, it doesn’t do her any good thinking about what-ifs.

 

Like he’s read her mind, he whispers to her, “I don’t think about what-ifs.” Then his mouth is hot against hers, his teeth nipping her bottom lip before his tongue slides along hers.

 

Everything she sees is an after-image, and when people talk about living in the present, it feels physically impossible. How can she sense the present when all she sees is the past?

 

Her ideas about free will went out the window the minute she walked back into the motel room with Richie hot on her heels. She wonders if Seth felt like a pawn, too, or just an afterthought. Like her family, was he just collateral damage?

 

She thought she was collateral damage until she heard about what happened to Kyle. Jessica told her the day she died that the rangers found him bloodless in his truck bed. It got her mind racing to that afternoon outside the barbeque joint, an aggression she’d never seen in him before, a spitefulness. And then it was a rabbit hole after that – the surprised knowing on Richie’s face after she kissed him, stretched on the altar under the professor’s knife, and then falling into Malvado’s hands, back into Richie’s, dying next to the blood well, the possessions and the rituals, every time reduced to a martyr.

 

They said it was prophecy and fate and hero-brothers bullshit, but she wonders how Seth could swallow that when he was always falling by the wayside, always underfoot while Richie was fulfilling his end of the bargain with whatever powers that be.

 

“Get out of your head, princess,” he breathes against her mouth, yanking her head back by her hair to snap her into focus.

 

Then it hits her. “You’re supposed to keep him honest.” She doesn’t realize she’s said it out loud until Seth is pulling back confused, blurry-eyed from drink.

 

He’s quiet for a beat, regarding her down the bridge of his nose almost cross-eyed. “We all need a reference point.”

 

She’s trying to pinpoint the moment they became hers, the needle in her compass, as she orients herself by slanting her mouth across his, all tongue and teeth and raw want. Her fingers trace the flames across his neck, her index falling into the little pits Richie left behind, and Seth catches her hand, holds it between them, and she gets a rush of déjà vu. But, he was so strung out then, she’s sure he couldn’t distinguish whether or not it was some dream dropped off by the white tiger. Now, she is trying to figure out how drunk he is, and he’s kissing her like he’s afraid to be sober.

 

Outside the Twister she imagined Seth was the saner half of the two, and then she witnessed him tumble headfirst into his vices without abandon. He’d get so chatty on those nights with nothing but the landing strip of the dotted center line to guide whatever shit-piece car they managed to boost that week. And she wondered what he was like without his brother in prison. She remembers hearing about Richie’s five-year stint in the woods while his brother served his nickel. She could only politely listen, politely watch him struggle with the rubber tubing, politely help guide the needle into the next available vein. As she watched Seth succumb to nightly inebriations, she realized he needed an anchor, too. Someone to remember him, remind him, bring him back into focus, because without his brother, he was just an amputee victim haunted by his phantom limb. And wasn’t Richie just the same in his shack in the woods. She would help Seth curl himself around the safety of a motel pillow and realized you could not have one without the other; they were a matched set.

 

She is just starting to figure out how she fits in to the well-practiced chaos of their lives.

 

“I don’t blame you,” she mumbles against his insistent mouth. “Anymore.”

 

Sometimes he looks at her like he’s a heartbeat away from dropping her ass off in front of the former Fuller stronghold. _Be the good one, preacher’s daughter_. He’s got that same look about him now, and she’s sick of it. She braces her foot behind his knee, slots herself right over his thigh so he can feel the wet heat there matching the humidity of his mouth, soaked in liquor and cigarettes. There’s no denying his reaction with or without her insinuating herself, and she nips along his jawline, her fingers creep-crawling down his chest, his stomach shuddering as she dives lower.

 

“Danger, danger,” he murmurs breathless, hints of guilt painting the moue of his mouth. His eyes follow her hands, and she marvels at his long lashes, too long for a man. _Angel Eyes_.

 

But, she doesn’t go for him, smiles sly as her fingers slip under the elastic of her pale pink panties. “I’ll start if you finish,” she whispers. He swallows hard, his eyes watching her hand slip deeper, knows her fingertips are brushing the apex of every nerve in her soft little body. It kind of flummoxes him, her small hands, her tiny bird feet, her button nose and general softness like the quintessential girl next door, so wholesome it’s disturbing how she knows what to do down there. And then he remembers Scott about to divulge some secret of hers in the Twister. _I caught her once -._ He stopped her brother then, but it didn’t stop his imagination running wild, wondering just how the preacher’s daughter made the Lord cry.

 

“Do you mind taking on one more passenger?” Seth sees the glare of Richie’s glasses over her shoulder, feels the mattress dip with his weight.

 

“Richie, what the fuck?”

 

“You’re a little late to the game, brother.”

 

Her breath hitches suddenly, her back arching and pressing her hips further into Seth’s. Her hands shoot up, death grip on Seth’s shirt and wrenching him close. She kisses him sloppy and he cannot see what’s going on down there, only bits of Richie’s face hazy in the periphery behind hers, one electric blue eye peeking up from behind her ear. She takes the Lord’s name in vain against his mouth, ends on a strangled whimper. Richie’s carving his teeth along the nape of her neck, his hands somewhere between her legs, and then Seth feels his brother’s fingertips accidentally brush the front of his slacks.

 

“Now that that’s freed up,” she gets out in a stuttered sigh, her hands traveling down Seth’s stomach again, fingertips playing with the edge of his white undershirt. His twisted morality is coiling in on itself, tail finding mouth, but its muddling as she breaks the bridge of his slacks, her hand searching, finding what she wants easily. His teeth haphazardly knock hers, click-click, as her fingers curl around his cock, the palm of her other hand smooth along the base. Never in his wildest dreams, he thinks as his own hand navigates between her legs from the front, bumping into where Richie’s got three fingers second-knuckle deep in her. He compensates by pressing two fingers to the little nub above, feels her hips jolt away, shake, tilt towards.

 

He’s never been close enough to see how much her eyes are like clear jade, rare things. Her hands are lathering him up, and his mind running a mile a minute, something in him knowing she couldn’t possibly know what she’s doing, but his brother is flush against her back working her over like he’s got her number. He’s thinking about every dirty thought he’s ever had about her and all the guilt that accompanied that, angry knowing his brother felt no such thing. His gut tightens; he’ll never know what she was like before. He kisses her mean, wondering how the hell they managed to drag a teenage girl into their bullshit, wondering why he cannot stop his eyes wandering, when he turned into such a humble Humbert.

 

But he is rounding for home and she’s reached for him a million times over now. A good man can only say no so many times, he thinks.

 

Richie reaches across their bodies, and Seth feels his rough palm laid over the black flames crawling up his neck. Seth’s close, his brother’s hand reassuring, comforting, centering. Her thigh is tight along his hip, her heel digging into the back of his knee, and he knows, it’s building, it’s breaking. She’s slippery wet against his fingers. He’s about to be over hers. He was never a good man.

 

Richie’s grip tightens over his neck as he comes, spills over her hands as he hears her stilted keening, her little breasts pressed tight to his chest as she breathes heavy, her mouth worrying against his clavicle. Richie’s hand retreats from his throat, her cunt, and he’s sitting up, three fingers second-knuckle deep between his lips.

 

“Preacher’s daughter strikes again,” he husks against her ear, feels the shiver down her shoulders.

 

“Possible location on late model Mercury Cougar, Quality Inn Barstow, suspects in armed bank robbery in San Bernardino.” Richie perks, stiff-shouldered and ear peeled to the scanner. He’s half-hard and his brother is still tangled up with Kate on the mattress as he starts shrugging his suit jacket back on, grabs the black duffle with the money.

 

“Honeymoon’s over,” he announces, kicks Seth’s leg lax against the bed. He grabs the Taurus from the nightstand, charges it, stuffs it in his waistband. “Hustle’s the word, brother.”

 

Seth curses, extricates himself from Kate’s spider monkey arms, and she looks on the verge of another catnap, sated and liquid-limbed. He has to find her shorts and pull them on for her before coaxing her onto his back, her arms wrapped haphazardly along his neck. They make it out the front door three minutes after the call over the scanner, piling into the cougar. Seth lays her down gently in the back before taking the driver’s seat. Richie tosses the duffel on the floor of the passenger seat before climbing into the back.

 

“Hey, I might need cover,” Seth argues, twisting the keys in the ignition. He looks down and realizes he hasn’t even zipped up.

 

Kate’s still hazy-eyed as she reaches to cradle Richie’s jaw in either palm, giddy she’ll get to feel the eight-cylinder roar while Richie brings her to another peak.

 

“Where to, peaches?” Richie asks her, kneeling half on the backseat floor, his knee between her legs.

 

She smiles soft, brings him down to her level. “Can you float in the Salton Sea?”

 

He nuzzles her pulse, admits, “Well enough.”

 

Seth sets the course, needle in their compass.

 

 


	4. Maldicao

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to say thank you for the comments and kudos :) Certainly helps keep morale up, so I appreciate it. 
> 
> References are made to another fic - take your time with me to lose your mind. This got long, so I split it into two parts (maybe three). Still working on the second part. Title from an Amalia Rodriguez song.
> 
> Maldicao by Amalia Rodriguez  
> Luz de Luna by Chavela Vargas feat. the Chieftains and Ry Cooder (Cooder's playful guitar coupled with Chavela's rasp just tickles me pink in this version.)  
> Sleepers Awake by Guadalcanal Diary  
> Carino Malo by Maria Dolores Pradera

The cougar lurches and they feel that sensation of the world turning upside down, the left-side tires leaving the ground for the barest moment, the chassis tilting before following the natural path of gravity and righting itself. They feel it, the righting of the world, the predictable progress of physics, but there is no similar righting of the fear in their gut.

 

“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice shaky, syllables wobbling. His head is heavy in her lap, dead weight, and she chokes down a sob, places her fingers under his jawline to feel what she thought would be the remnants of a pulse, but his blood is thrumming violently under her index and middle finger. There’s panic in every one of his vessels but an unsettling calm in his eyes, a hazy disconnection.

 

“Pressure, lots of pressure,” Richie barks at the rearview, and then her palms are layered over the entry wound throbbing in the juncture between collar and shoulder. There is the squelch of blood escaping through the spaces between her fingers, and she feels the angry pulse of his dying under her hands, a gushing with nowhere to go but out.

 

His left palm faced up in his lap, the Ruger balanced against his lifeline, obscuring the subtle break in that crease. He curls his fingers reflexively around the grip still warm.

 

 _And dying in the arms of a beautiful woman_. But, she’s just shy of all that in the eyes of the law, crying over him, and he never imagined he would have a saint mourning him. He sees three of her like the three Marys at the foot of Jesus, but he isn’t dying for her sins, never so selfless. She is all watery smiles, though, and he realizes he said it out loud. “I’m bleeding all over your white dress.” An apology without an actual apology, but she sweeps one hand over his forehead, back across his crown, over and over again without thinking about the blood she’s smearing over his brow.

 

Richie’s voice from around the shoulder of the driver’s seat. “Is there an exit wound?”

 

She learns by feel, her fingers reaching under his shoulder, feels his suit jacket intact. “No, is that good?”

 

Richie doesn’t reply, accelerating through the next four-way stop, and she repeats her question, replacing her hand over the rupture in his shoulder.

 

“Fuck it.” The cougar swerves onto the gravel shoulder and Richie kills the engine. She peers out the passenger window to see where they are, some frontage road peeled off the main vein of the interstate. Nothing but sagebrush hills against steep mountain rises and a pair of burrowing owls perched on road posts, staring unblinking as Richie shoves open the driver’s door, yanks the seat forward and starts crawling into the back.

 

“Keep your dirty snake hands off my sunny personality, brother,” he warns, barely making sense, but he presses the muzzle of the Ruger to the stressed vein in Richie’s temple as he reaches for his brother’s throat, searching for the blueprint he left behind.  

 

“You’re empty,” Richie bluffs.

 

His smirk is weak, but he pulls the hammer back. “I know what you’re thinking,” he starts, coughs. “Did he fire six shots or only five?”

 

“You’re ruining the upholstery,” Richie gripes, his head bowed, and he can feel the tremor in his brother’s wrist from where the cold muzzle is held to his temple.

 

She wants to reach out and slip her palm up over the back of Richie’s neck where she knows his sweat has gone cold, clammy, but she is afraid of what he would do if he felt his brother’s blood on his skin. She knows what he would do if his brother was out cold, and she can see it in Seth’s eyes laboring with consciousness, the fear of waking up something other.

 

“Fuck off, Richie.” Seth doesn’t release the hammer, looking at his brother upside down with his head tilted back in Kate’s lap, his eyes crossing with the effort.

 

“Hey, we need to get him to a doctor.” She cannot keep the pleading from her voice, and her fingers itch to graze behind Richie’s ear but she keeps both hands firm over Seth’s entry wound. Her face must be a mess of snot and tears, but she sucks it up.

 

“Winnemucca’s two hours away and we can’t go back to Reno.” Richie reaches for his brother’s throat again, but Seth warns he has no qualms with blowing his brains across the leather, and then he’ll drive them the rest of the way to Winnemucca while Richie’s temporary corpse rides bitch in the trunk. But, he’d rather not. He’s comfortable where he is. He doesn’t tell them he feels a chill while the epicenter of his ruin is burning, the only thing telling him he is still alive despite his brother and Kate swimming in his vision. A curse bitter on his tongue when he realizes he cannot feel pain there anymore. He can barely feel Kate’s hands on him, but he fights the cold, the shock seeping in around the edges of his control.

 

Richie’s shrugging off his suit jacket and Seth feels so cramped with all three of them crushed into the backseat, but then his brother is wiping away Kate’s hands and stuffing the rolled-up jacket against the mess in his shoulder. Richie wraps him up in duct tape while Kate struggles to hold Seth semi-upright. Richie bites off the end of the duct tape and drops his brother back in Kate’s lap, crawls out of the backseat before he can change his mind.

 

“You die, just remember I know where the door to hell is,” Richie promises as he turns the engine over.

 

* * *

  

Like the perfect nightmare, he wakes up supine on a stainless-steel table staring up into sun-bright fluorescence. He wants to touch his chest and check for a Y-stitch, but his arms won’t work. He wonders if there are plastic bags marked with the names of his organs sealed up in his gut. No one must have bothered to tell the coroner he just needed to marinate in his brother’s venom a little longer before he started kicking again.

 

“You can’t go yet. You’re not allowed.”

 

He lets his head drop to the side, an afterimage of fluorescence pasted over her face for a moment until she comes into focus. Her chin is perched on the lip of the table, only inches from his that he can smell her stale breath, see the vessels broken in the whites of her eyes, and she just looks like a tired little girl.

 

“I can’t believe you let him.”

 

She chuckles short and her features crumple briefly. He thinks she is going to start crying again, but she shakes her head. “I locked him out; we had to barricade the door. You’re lucky it’s steel, but we’re going to have to pay for the damages.” She lays her arm along the edge of the table, and he spies a needle taped to the crook of her elbow where he knows its soft, where he likes to nip, leave a mark that never stays. His eyes trace the thin tubing down where he has an identical needle pinned to his forearm.

 

“But you’re,” he starts, and she finishes. “I don’t think it works that way. What I have, it’s just for me.”

 

“What if it takes?”

 

She flexes her fingers and then makes a fist, repeats to keep the blood going. “You’ll still have your sunny personality.”

 

He knocks his head back against the table, hears a similar knock from somewhere. “So, I’m over the hill?”

 

She reaches for his hand, curls her fingers along his palm and squeezes to keep the blood going. “You’re talking to me.”

 

* * *

 

They could feel it all at once. Something you only hear about in books or movies, but when it happens it’s as if you’re not sure you’re awake or dreaming, this stillness before a storm.

 

“What the hell is that?”

 

Judgment, she thinks before the bullets rain and Seth is tucking her into his suit jacket. She wonders if there will be a freeze frame today.

 

* * *

 

Richie nudges her awake, and she slides out from under the shelter of his arm where he kept her tucked most of the drive up to the Alvord Playa. She peeks into the backseat and studies the subtle rise and fall of Seth’s chest, resists the urge to hold her compact mirror to his gaped mouth. The sling keeps his right arm slung tight across his chest, keeps him from pulling at the stitches.

 

They paid the veterinarian handsomely for his services with the express knowledge he was going to tip off the bulls, but it was okay. He gave them pain pills and fish antibiotics and fresh bandages, and he waited until they were an hour outside Winnemucca to dial three little numbers. As they left the animal hospital, she nearly joked about placing Seth in a collar to keep him from worrying his stitches, but he was so loopy from the pain meds and blood loss, she helped lay him out in the backseat of the cougar sans a quip. He mumbled in his sleep the whole way up the 140, silly fever-hazed bits about which guns were more likely to jam or reminiscing about past scores. Eventually the pills really kicked in and knocked him out cold.

 

She feels bad now, reaching over the front seat to shake him awake. His free arm lashes out and catches her wrist, but his face pinches into a grimace, regrets moving too fast too soon. She doesn’t try to pull away, knowing it will hurt him more.

 

“We need to refuel the RV before they close,” she explains. “You can sleep in the bed.”

 

“Are we gonna cuddle?” he wonders offhand, releasing her wrist, leaving a nice rosy ring around her carpals.

 

She smiles, because through whatever opiates the good doctor flushed him with he is still making stupid jokes. Jokes that must make perfect sense in his head but come out of context in hers. “If you want,” she offers, patting his chest gently above where the sling cradles his bum arm.

 

Richie rolls himself out of the driver’s seat, yanks the seat forward. Blood-shot eyes and the sun is a few hours from setting but still too high for this shit that he can feel his scalp smoking. He hasn’t eaten in two days, but he parked the cougar close enough to the Winnebago. “Up and at ‘em, soldier.” He starts carefully manipulating Seth out of the backseat, bracing his arm along his brother’s back to stabilize his injured shoulder. Seth plants his feet on the hard-cracked clay, lets Richie bend him forward and then slowly help fold him out of the cougar.

 

Kate opens the RV door quickly, kicks the side to coax the steps to tumble down. Richie practically drags his brother up the trailer steps, hears Seth’s bootheels clicking against the flimsy aluminum. After locking the cougar doors, she clips up into the Winnie, jerking the door closed behind her. It doesn’t quite fit the frame anymore.

 

Richie eases his brother onto the bed, and Kate finds the keys under her father’s favorite mug in the kitchenette cabinet. As they pass each other, she slips the keys into Richie’s palm, lobster red and healing slow. He momentarily leans down, his nose brushing her temple and she can hear fangs snipping through the gum-line behind his lips. “Later,” she murmurs, knowing she is at least a liter short. He tries to hide his disappointment behind the glare of his glasses, slinks off towards the driver’s seat.

 

Taking her place against the rear wall of the RV, she watches Seth follow the warmth of her lap, settles his head against her thigh.

  

* * *

 

 

Richie is filling up the water tanks outside when she bends over to whisper in Seth’s ear, her palms framing his jaw, considering giving him a shave when they get back to the playa. “What do you want?”

 

He curls wisps of her hair around his fingers, his eyes tracing her hairline. “Saltwater taffy.” She gives him a queer look, but he stays firm, craves something sweet and simple.

 

“Nothing else?”

 

“Just the taffy, thanks.”

 

When she hears the pump cut off, she pecks the tip of his nose and eases herself out from under his torso, slides off the mattress towards where Richie is waiting at the entrance of the Winnie. He’s wearing a wide brim hat she doesn’t recognize. She wants to flip it off his head and tell him he ain’t no white hat, but the tips of his ears are singed like grilled red peppers. Her hunger is catching up.

 

“You don’t want shoes?”

 

She steps off the bottom step onto pea gravel. “I’d rather feel the earth under my feet.”

 

* * *

 

 As she peruses the barrel of mix-matched flavors, a hand crosses her vision, buries itself in the vat of taffy. “Well hey there, darling.” Her gaze snaps up, catches on some construction company logo stark against the fluorescent orange of his shirt, partially obscured by the safety glasses hanging from his neck. He has raccoon eyes from too much sun and smells like sweat and grease, cloying from how close he gets to her. “Where’d you blow in from?”

 

“Bozeman,” she lies, skirting the edge of the taffy barrel away from him. He watches the swish of her hemline across her thighs as she moves, his eyes glued to the space between. She still has on the sundress from the day before, the smocked waist smeared with blood, but he can’t see it under the navy hoody she’s got all the way zipped up, something she found stuffed between the Winnebago cushions, smelled faintly of Scott.

 

The man cannot seem to bring his eyes above where the skirt ends high on the thigh. “Yeah, you here alone?” Following her around the barrel, he picks over the taffy lazily, pretends to inspect the candy as he hopes for a peek of peachy cheek, and she occasionally feels his chest brush her shoulder. In her mind, she can feel the shadow of a vulture rounding and rounding from above.

 

“I’m with my brothers.” She drops a piece of taffy into her wax paper bag, something an irradiated blue.

 

He gathers a mess of taffy up into his fist. “Damn, you’re cute.” He lets them drop one by one back into the barrel. “What’s your flavor, darling?”

 

“I don’t think my brothers would like me talking to strangers, mister.”

 

He chuckles, tosses a grape at her. “You’re a big girl now.” She thinks to herself, nearly there. He unwraps something obscenely pink and slips it between sunburned lips. Humming his delight, he leans into her. “Cherry, my favorite.”

 

“I gotta go now.” She can feel him watch her as she goes, shifting the cherry taffy over his tongue as it softens, his gaze burning between her thighs.

 

She finds Richie at the diner counter. He’s too tired to be specific, points at the specials board for three orders. She leans her head against his arm and tells him she’s going to use the bathroom before they go. He only nods, slumped over on one of the stools. Before she heads for the restroom, she asks the waitress for a strawberry shake, and Richie puts in for two more.

 

* * *

 

 

The faucet is still running when he corners her against the sink, his Pendleton Round Up belt buckle digging into the root of her spine. He has her pinned to the cheap Formica counter, his fingers gathering up her skirt, leaving behind smudgy prints on the white linen. “Come on, Montana,” he breathes into her ear, and she tosses her elbow straight back into his floating ribs.

 

“Little pistol,” he grits out, catching her offending elbow, his other hand clasping the back of her neck and she goes down, her cheekbone hard against the lip of the sink and her forehead digging into the faucet. Taffy skitters across the linoleum at her feet, clipping her bare toes.

 

She doesn’t have to worry long, the insolent pressure of his belt buckle easing off, a slew of curses and her hips free from the sink counter.

 

Richie’s got his hands fisted in the man’s shirt as he guides him backwards out the back-door propped open to cool down the steamy kitchen down the hall. The cook cannot hear the commotion over the sound of the vents and fans, but she keeps an eye on the opening to the kitchen.

 

She looks down at the saltwater taffy scattered about her bare feet and hears Richie slam the man into the dumpster, his body nothing but a bag of meat in Richie’s hands, and then a sick tearing and gurgling, a throaty inhale before he dives back in for seconds. She starts to collect the taffy back into the wax bag, chocolate, an orange, swirled green apple, a visceral pink cherry flattened into a little pancake. She leaves the cherry behind and twists the top of the wax bag as she hears the dumpster lid slam closed and then Richie’s filling up the back-entrance. Kate grabs up the plastic grocery bags slumped next to the bathroom door when he starts towards her.

 

He grips her shoulder, turns her about-face and guides her back into the restaurant. The waitress has their order bagged up on the counter. Richie double checks the receipt stapled to the top of the bags, then gathers up the greasy paper sacks in one hand. He keeps his hand on her shoulder, fingertips pressed into her collar nearly painful, but she lets him direct her back to the RV.

 

“He started it,” she protests halfway across the lot.

 

“I’m sure, princess.” He stops her short of the Winnebago door, which she opens but the steps don’t drop. Before she can kick the side, he’s lifting her into the trailer and hopping up after her.

 

* * *

 

 

She wonders why he still wears those birth-control glasses like a security blanket, but he is still traditions and codes and classics, a sucker for nostalgia. With those thick frames like subtle blind spots on the edges of his vision, she occasionally catches him bump his head on cabinets or light fixtures. Does he prefer the world to remain just a hair out of focus or are there lingering parts of him that need the coke-bottle lenses to nudge him back in line, humble him? Like her, does he need to preserve the leftovers of his humanity in the form of everyday mundanities, prescription glasses and bible salesman suits and restrictive collars, top it off with a strawberry shake from the neighborhood greasy spoon.

 

She has been inside him and there are still parts of herself stuck to the walls of his mind, crouched like spiders in the corners with all eight eyes peeled to the worst parts of him. He felt it itching where the end pieces of his glasses dig behind his ears, catching a flash of traffic-cone orange in the periphery where the lenses end and swiveling in the diner stool towards the opening in the wall where she’d just passed. Perhaps he’s tapped her vein too many times now that her pulse has replaced his, because he sits in the stool and stares at his wrist, feels a jump and a race that isn’t his.

 

He is nearly too tired to bother, jonesing to get back to the beach and pass out, but he was hoping to top off with Katie-Cakes for dessert, the cherry to end his shit storm of a day, reasons there won’t be much of that if he doesn’t get off his ass. So, he slides off the stool and makes the march for the bathroom, passes by the short order cook flipping their burgers, his stomach gurgling unhappily.

 

At first, he could only see an expanse of fluorescent orange reflective even in the dim of the diner bathroom, but then her bare legs knock-kneed between dirty jeans, and after a whole mess of red, something squishing under his boot, nearly slipping on a wet spot in the hall. Rust and dust and machinery grease flooding his mouth that goes down easier with a little – what did Carlos call it – _mordidas_ , aftertaste of artificial cherry and terror.

 

Pockets the money clip, and he notices the two-hundred-dollar belt buckle, pulls the leather from its loops with one hand propping dead weight against the dumpster. It’ll do in a pinch, he thinks, flipping the body into the dumpster and tossing a few bulging Hefty bags over it. He rolls up the belt and tucks it into his inner chest pocket, figures he can pawn the buckle in Burns.

 

On the drive back, he drops the buckle in the cupholder between them, and she skirts her eyes over it, glances up at him, turns her attention back to the sun nearly gone behind the steep rise of the Steens. She’s got her legs folded up against her torso, her head balanced in the dip between her knees. There are fingernail tracks up the run of her left thigh. He traces their ascent to where they disappear at the high hem of her sundress. He moves his tongue over the roof of his mouth, residual cherry cough syrup taste tacky on his teeth, swallows the need to wash it down with something a little more complex, a lot more satisfying.

 

“I am not your palate cleanser,” she declares without looking at him.

 

* * *

 

 

It always takes longer for karma to come back round and fuck him sideways. Seems to find his brother sooner.

 

He didn’t see it when it was right under his nose, and he guesses karma works like that, a sneaky bitch with a pious mouth, a smile fit for a saint, and it was so easy to just keep pushing her over, nudging her aside. He used up all his luck with her, drained the well as it were, cue laugh track. It was cruel kismet seeing her splattered across the rig platform, and there was shame, an unfamiliar and cold weight in his gut, born from that karmic ripple.

 

He couldn’t shoot the fawn; it was effortless to flay the snake. It tripped him up when the snake wore the fawn, and he was properly chastised for hesitating on the trigger after that, tumbling headfirst into the karmic prison she built special for him. He thought he knew shame after watching her die the first time. _You won’t know the meaning of the word until..._ It was not shame for his actions but guilt for what he was. Only she could make him feel ashamed of himself.

 

It was made special for him, he knows, with all the right awful trimmings. She had an eye for the details, perfected his personal hell. He tore apart her life; it only made sense she should get the chance to tear apart his mind. And she was so good at it.

 

Over the edge of his brother’s shoulder, her eyes glow luminescent red like a predator, one eye disappearing and reappearing with each rise and fall of his brother’s chest. He’s starting to think Seth might be sleeping too much, stops thinking when she crawls over his brother, her ankle catching Seth’s hip accidentally. She goes stock still, glances down at Seth snoring, mercifully oblivious.

 

She completes her journey and settles over him, hums as his hands curl up over the handles of her hips, fingers skimming under her sleep shorts. Her fingers play over the buttons of his shirt, unfastened for once. “Do you still hear voices?”

 

He tilts her forward, raises his pelvis just slightly to create a pleasing rhythm, and she lets him, her hips pliant and cooperative in his hands. “Do you still hear voices?”

 

She spreads her hands out over his stomach, moves them to either side just slightly to open the front of his shirt like peeking behind the curtains. “Only when I listen.”

 

“Yeah, what do they tell you?” One errant thumb pulling aside the hem of her sleep shorts, noting the lack of underwear, pressing down on the tender spot just under her hipbone to make her jolt ticklish. He kneads the soft flesh behind her hipbones as an insincere apology.

 

“You built it.”

 

His hands still her hips. “What?”

 

“You think she made it for you. You think I helped,” she confesses, folding herself over him, her long red hair a shroud around their faces. “All she had to do was put you in a room with yourself, Richie. Wind you up and watch you go.”

 

There’s a pulse above their heads, and Richie tilts his eyes up to watch the steady expansion and contraction of the diaphragm around the ribcage, humid and hot inside the cavity of her mind with her heart thrumming above them. He reached for it once in something like a dream, but it felt real, a daylight hallucination when he sunk his hand into her abdomen and punctured up through the tough muscle of her diaphragm. He wanted to show it to her, show her that despite him she would survive it, him, the enigma ravaging her insides. _Here, don’t you see how special you are_.

 

“You’ve always been a marble shy,” she whispers to him from within the shroud of her insides. “Misguided gifts are your strong suit, though,” she reasons, smiling and spreading her hands along his jawline.

 

“It was a tennis bracelet for Christ’s sake,” he argues, prying her fingers off his cheeks.

 

“You gave her a diamond bracelet and it just had to come with an inane backstory. You gave jewelry to a girl who’d only ever been given gifts of flesh and feathers. Did you ever notice she was happiest when you fed her?”

 

“She was happiest when I didn’t touch her.”   

 

“I feel sorry for you, Richie,” she admits, letting him gather her hands in his. “I really do. You thought you were what she wanted, but there was only ever one man who knew what she needed even when she didn’t want it. You would’ve been good to her, but you weren’t good for her. I don’t know if you’re good for anyone.”

 

“I know I’m a monster.”

 

Her heart races above them like a frightened bird beating against the confines of its cage, sensing the storm but unable to fly away. _All the animals knew_.

 

“I’m your monster.” He leans up to kiss her, misses the mark on her chin.  

 

She laughs. “Your codependence is staggering.” Something taps an offense against his sternum, small and concentrated, and she is good at that, too, always aiming her judgment right where it needs to go.

 

“Your pride more so.” Another voice from outside the curtain of her insides, snakes weaving in and out of the visceral red shroud of her hair. One hisses in his ear and he tosses her to the side, sprawled over his brother dead to the world.

 

When Richie sits up, there’s a man standing at the foot of the bed, spider-limbed and gaunt, parts of him powdering from his bones in little puffs of dust. When he shifts his aviators down the bridge of his nose, there are eyes without whites, all pupil with constellations lined up in their depths, stars he doesn’t recognize.

 

“Said I’d see you there, cowboy.” He clips the brim of his white Stetson with thumb and forefinger. The barrel of the Blackhawk centered on Richie’s sternum, canted just a little to the left like an afterthought.

 

A little boy’s whimper then a bang.

 

She flips a pillow behind her head to smack him on the face. Her sleepy murmur muffled against Seth’s intact shoulder, “It’s just a dream, egg head.” He wants to curve himself along her back, pry her off Seth who’s been held under some Vicodin-enhanced fever dream since they left the RV Park, but she’s got her fingers tangled in his brother’s undershirt, knows moving her is going to jostle his brother and the stitches are still fresh.

 

* * *

 

 

She weaves scorpion tails of golden fiddleneck in her hair, presses balsamroot and stalks of lupine between bible pages over her favorite verses. Perched on top of warm volcanic rock, she can see the entire expanse of the playa from here, framed by distant mesas and the solitary strip of highway. She can spy the RV parked just past the stunted grasses lining the edge of the playa, the cougar nowhere to be seen. They have been holed up here for three days now, Seth passed out for nearly three quarters of it, and she could not stand one more minute of Richie’s quiet restlessness, controlled but grating on her nerves nonetheless.

 

When she stares up at the steep rise of the Steens, it is hard not to imagine Butch and the Kid hiding behind every rock, watching the merry band of bounty hunters beelining through their tracks without pause. But, she isn’t feeling it, that cold sense of something coming, someone looking. Wouldn’t Richie know it if the lawman was sniffing them out? He is their Lord Baltimore, but she second guesses now. He has been uncharacteristically distracted lately, like something’s gotten inside his head. And it is difficult; her ESP isn’t as finely tuned as his. She wants to ask, but there is a part of her that knows she won’t like the answer.

 

She drops her gaze from the playa to the open bible in her lap and catches the lizard basking on a sunny patch next to her knee. Lidless eyes poised on her, motionless and tailless, nothing but a little nub left on its rear and healed over, but it seems unperturbed by its loss, no fear of her even after losing something so essential, something that might throw lesser creatures off balance. She smiles. “You just keep rolling with the punches, don’t you?” It bounces on its front legs, head bobbing, and she asks if he wants to go, dares him with her hand raised, and as soon as the shadow falls on the lizard, he bounds off the side of the rock.

 

She mirrors the lizard when she hears the roar of the cougar’s eight cylinder at the base of the mountain. He keeps the engine idling as she meanders down, shifting her jam bag to the other shoulder as she nears the car.

 

She rests her elbows over the open passenger window, stares at him over the edge of her father’s aviators. “What do you want?” A shadow passes overhead, again, a turkey vulture making measured circles in the sky.

 

“I want to show you something,” he offers, sliding his thumb along the steering wheel and watching the cross dangle from her neck.

 

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

 

“Seth is doing enough of that for both of us.” He watches her form a big bubble of Bazooka Joe and it pops against her mouth, splat across her chin. “Just get in the car.”

 

She smacks her gum and jerks the door handle, slides into the passenger seat. He takes note when she sets her bag between them.

 

“What’s that smell?”

 

She presses her nose to her wrist where she rubbed the velvety leaves against her skin. “Sagebrush. I want to make a perfume out of it.”

 

* * *

 

 

Her hand sails through the air, mimics the aerodynamics of a bird’s wing to let the wind lift her palm. They pass only three cars on the way to wherever Richie takes them. She counts all the different kinds of raptors she spots gliding through the pastures until Richie splits from the highway onto gravel road and passes under a ranching gate, a steer’s skull mounted above the nameplate.

 

“Are you sure we’re allowed in here?”

 

He gives her a look daring someone to tell them different, and she just shoves her palm against her mouth to keep from sniping.

 

When he parks next to a wash, she asks him how he found out about this place. “It’s a secret.” It gets an eyeroll. He ignores it and reaches across her to fish the Maglite out of the glove compartment. She peers doubtfully down the wash drop-off, her chin balanced on the windowsill, but she cannot see what’s so special about this place yet, even as Richie is folding out of the driver’s seat and skidding down into the wash.

 

The soles are peeling off her cowboy boots, and she isn’t sure they will survive a slide down, but Richie disappears somewhere in the wash and she knows he’s never keen on waiting for her. A part of her wants to spite him and start walking back to the highway, hitch a ride back to the playa or disappear to Burns and buy new boots. But who knows when she’d finally get around to coaxing a ride on that isolated patch of road.

 

She rolls out of the passenger seat and runs straight down into the wash. Richie is standing at the threshold of the tunnel. Above his head there is a metal plaque nailed into the rock, and she can make out the characteristic square and compass centered around a singular G.

 

“That’s not what I think it is.”

 

He flicks the flashlight on and off at her. “There’re worse things.”

 

“Well, it’s definitely a devil I don’t know,” she reasons, joining him at the entrance to the tunnel. “Can I hold the flashlight?”

 

“Tough luck, peaches.” He clicks on the Maglite and starts into tunnel.

 

Her eyes track the skittering of the flashlight over the rocks and she calls after him, “This is how every horror movie starts!” But, she follows him anyway, skipping over rocks and trying not to twist an ankle.

 

He runs the flashlight over the walls, and she reads the graffiti. It settles her a little more seeing the leftovers of teenage antics, profanity and amateur tags in a place with such bad juju. He is telling her this is an old lava tube, how it was formed, the geology behind it, but she is too busy wondering how far they’ve gone. When she looks back, the entrance is a pinprick. As her gaze comes forward, Richie shines the flashlight on a wooden structure some distance ahead, and she’s curious, confused, until she realizes it is a set of bleachers. The flashlight finds a circuit box and wiring weaving through the wooden frame. Richie notes at least the place has electric; they must’ve hooked it up to generators for ceremonies and shit. But, her gut sinks when the light finds a concrete platform centered between the pair of bleachers, enough seats for a home football game.

 

“Okay, deal breaker.” She starts to turn to go, but Richie grabs her arm.

 

“Hey, don’t you want to see how it ends?”

 

“Are you going to make some joke about sacrificing virgins?” He shines the flashlight under his smirk, and she tries to yank her arm away. “Everyone treats me like a sacrifice.”

 

He shines the light in her eyes. “Die for our sins, Katie-Cakes.”

 

She bowls him over the head, but he muscles her to the concrete of the platform. “Richie, don’t.” But, he has her back against the concrete. She shifts uncomfortably, regrets wearing a dress, disappointed he was able to get his hips between her legs, and she is successfully pinned. Her head falls to the side and sees the ring bolts anchored to the platform. A memory of chains drawn tight, the links grinding against one another, and she tries to wrest her arms out of Richie’s hands, tries to tell him she can feel what’s happened here, wants to ask him why he thought to bring her here, what was going on in that twisted nut of his.

 

With their struggle, her jam bag spills across the platform, and Richie catches the thudding of something heavier than makeup or sanitary pads against concrete. “Why do you have rocks in your bag?” The flashlight rests next to her face, shining across the platform on the three baseball-sized rocks she found on the mountainside by the playa.

 

He picks up one of the stones, inspects the unnatural roundness, and without comment smashes the rock into the concrete platform. It breaks into three pieces, and then she sees the eye of opal inside. “How’d you know what’s inside?”

 

He just gives her a look, and she wants to smack him on the head again. _I know what’s inside of everything._

 

He leaves the shattered thunderegg in her hands before he journeys down between her legs, and she cannot break her gaze from the anchored bolts in the platform. She tries to close her knees, but he shoulders between them. His arms are braced up under her thighs when he drags her towards him, her shoulder blades scraping along the concrete, and she hisses her discomfort, feels skin give way. Her thumb runs across the smooth surface of the opal as he thumbs aside her panties, his breath hot between her legs. He skims his teeth along her inner thigh, and she digs her thumb into the opal’s eye.

 

She hears dripping somewhere deeper in the tunnel, and it reminds her of the leaky faucet in the RV where they left Seth asleep. She peers into the enigmatic black at the end of the tunnel, vaguely recalls Richie telling her the natives believed these were passageways to the underworld. Then, she sees the faint reflection of water against the tunnel walls picking up the weak light from the Maglite. The reflection sharpens and she watches the fluctuations of turquoise light against the tunnel walls, only it isn’t the tunnel anymore, much like this dank tomb but graffiti swapped for runes and carvings in stone just as ancient.

 

She runs her fingers across the soiled silk, blood still drying. “What’s this?”

 

He reaches around her shoulder to close the briefcase, gives her time to remove her hand. “A promise.”

 

“Can you put a price on Santanico?”

 

“I cannot, but the Geckos can.” He smooths his hand over the top of the briefcase. “You can tell a lot about a person based on what they’re willing to sacrifice. How many times has your brother given you up?” The thought, the running tally, and her courage wilts so easily. He angles his body towards her, slips his hand under her jaw, the silver point of the ring a tender warning against her pulse. “What about you? What are you willing to sacrifice?”

 

It is every good Christian’s duty to trust in death, because to trust in death is to trust in God. Death never frightened her, but she never wanted to die.

 

She imagined what he would be like, a Lord, a self-proclaimed god, but all she got was some creature twisted and lovesick, a shade of vulnerability and she knew he was not the devil. At least he knew when to fold his hand, something the Geckos never could wrap their heads around.

 

For each of them, she is one of many in a line of poor substitutes – an imitation Santanico, an imitation Richie, an imitation sister, an imitation body for a god – a lamb to sacrifice in pursuit of the real thing.

 

What happens when the next prophecy rolls around and she is on the chopping block again? Is that all she is waiting for now?

 

Kate can see her. A girl with wind-chafed cheeks and freckled shoulders, a former rodeo queen, on her way home from FFA. Rounding the corner behind the town museum only two blocks from her house, and then the dropping of a tailgate, the smell of diesel and cow shit and the burlap rough against her skin. Every bony part of her body feels each pothole and the rough grade of gravel road until she’s turned out at the mouth of the tunnel. They drag her towards the platform, bleachers lit up like a home game. The town sold out for this show. She can hear the men whispering promises and prayers as they chain her to the platform – the reverend and the ranger. For a moment she is a prize steer at auction and that is how they see her, that is what they need her to be, a prime cut to satisfy the powers that be.

 

“Through you our community survives,” the reverend tells her, but his voice reaches out across the crowd of familiar faces. His voice reaches for reason to justify the knife he draws across her throat. Kate gasps, her hands pressing to the awful red smile under her chin, blood flowing over her fingers.

 

There are hands prying hers away, someone pulling her upright, a palm warm against the back of her neck. She fights her way to the surface, liquid warmth flooding across her collar, seeping down the valley between her breasts.

 

“Look at me.” The lenses of his glasses obscure his eyes, so she pushes them up his forehead, those manic blue irises swallowed up in the dark of the tunnel. There is a girl dying with her throat cut in the back of Kate’s mind, and Richie doesn’t look worried in the least that she still sees things that aren’t there, that she has one foot in the upside-down. She can see it in the twitch at the corners of his mouth as he tries not to smile. She’s not playing with a full deck of cards, and he’s holding one too many jokers.

 

“Tell me something,” she breathes against his mouth, two of her hands making up one of his as she guides it between her thighs, and he follows the pendulum swing of her whims and tempers. He eases two fingers up inside her still slick from before, kisses the side of her mouth when her gut seizes with a caught breath. He waits until she relaxes around his fingers to whisper in her ear, “Something.”  Her nails dig into his wrist as she grinds her clit down against the heel of his hand.

 

She hears him fumbling with his belt as he nips the spot under her ear eager. Her tongue is pressed tight behind her teeth to hold in the words, because maybe it is supposed to happen this way, prime cut on an abandoned altar. She was all those things and more, FFA officer, rodeo queen and homecoming royalty, preacher’s daughter and Sunday school teacher, sweet and kind and soft and easy to put down.

 

“What happens next time?”

 

“Next time?”

 

Something about it rubs her the wrong way, and she forces herself to stop moving against the heel of his hand, huffs exasperation against his shoulder as her peak wanes. He smells like Red Apples and something else under the soap they all share, something she can never place but it makes her whole body want to fit against him, lock and key, but she resists the urge. “The next time hell comes calling.” The next time he needs a lamb to slaughter.

 

“Some days I’m not sure we ever left,” he admits easily. “Come here.” His free arm is braced across her lower back and drawing her near. She feels his fingers slip out, leave a cold wet trail across the inside of one thigh before he tangles them in her panties, stretching the cotton beyond the point of no return, the fabric ready to give way, elastic chafing awful.

 

“I’m not your lamb.” He is making her into something he wants, and she shivers when he whispers _tiger, tiger_. Her panties rip, and she covers his mouth with both palms. He mouths a verse against her hands, and she uses his shoulders to stand up and leave, but he grips the backs of her knees to keep her in place, grounded to the altar. She stares into the black maw of the tunnel, feels it stare back, feels his fingers creep crawl up the back of one thigh like an uninspired apology, because he doesn’t know the meaning of the word sorry; she isn’t sure he knows shame. Sometimes it makes her feel safe, his – it isn’t even moral relativism but the absence of ethos. But now, it makes her feel like a victim. He snatches her wrist to make her look at him.

 

“You wanna keep Tom and Jerrying this thing?”

 

“Am I the cat or the mouse?”

 

He smirks and kisses the inside of her wrist. “Sometimes even I can’t tell.”

 

* * *

 

 “I shouldn’t even pick you up,” he reasons, lets the cougar crawl in neutral next to her.

 

She stops and swivels on her heels, the rubber loose under the soles of her feet, and she wobbles a little but keeps her composure as she stares him down the bridge of her aviators, feels better when the cougar accidentally stalls. “Why? Because I wouldn’t fuck you in – .“ She gestures behind her. “Jesus, whatever that place was.”

 

“Just get in the car before I change my mind.” She starts towards the highway, and he turns the engine over again, rolls along beside her. She stops and the cougar’s engine hitches and dies. He slams the heel of his hand into the steering wheel.

 

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” She whips the passenger door open and slides onto the hot leather seat, folds her skirt under her scalded thighs. “Misguided affection is your strong suit.”

 

Richie must sense the rush of blood when he glances down at her legs, traces the flush along the edge of her thigh, rising up from the back of her knees. He presses his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and turns back to the dash, turns the engine over. Or it’s something else, she thinks.

 

It’s quiet under the crunch of the tires on pea gravel until Richie says out of the blue. “I never thanked you.” He doesn’t look at her, though, or elaborate, and she prompts him for context. “For sticking with my brother. You didn’t have to do that.” It’s a token gesture, and she blank stares the odd olive branch he’s offered her.

 

“Yeah well, it wasn’t entirely selfless,” she admits for the first time.

 

“I know, but – it was better he had someone.”

 

“And you? Were you better off?” He doesn’t answer, and she thinks about Malvado confessing the value of Santanico. “You can’t keep treating everyone like a means to an end.”

 

“You were never a means to an end.” He rolls out onto the highway, nearly misses getting T-boned by a hay truck.

 

A cloud of hay and dust blows through the windows, but she doesn’t blink even when she feels the crosswind shift the entire car, even if it is the first confession of something he has ever given her. “Oh yeah, then what was I?”

 

“A snag.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the places in this are real, and I tried to recollect the details to the best of my abilities, but I took a few artistic liberties with some descriptions. By the way, the lava tube that doubles as freemason lodge exists, and it is very, very creepy. There is a concrete platform and bleachers and all the trimmings for satanic ceremony in place, and the whole tunnel feels haunted by sacrifices past.


	5. Let Me Belong To You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title from a Brian Hyland song. 
> 
> 3AM by Guadalcanal Diary  
> Let Me Belong To You by Brian Hyland  
> Non E Niente by Catherine Spaak

When they get back to the playa, Seth is sprawled in a lawn chair under the shade of the Winnie’s awning. His feet rest on a cooler, a fresh beer dangling by the neck in his good hand.

 

“How was your field trip, kiddos?” He gingerly bends over to fetch Richie a beer, but his brother waves him off, tells him he is ready to pass out. Richie disappears into the RV, and Seth looks to Kate. “What about you, sweetheart?”

 

She shuffles over and grabs a beer from the open cooler. “You got a bottle opener?” He lifts his hips out of the chair to offer her his belt buckle, and even though it’s the Pendleton Round-Up she laughs, grabs his belt and pulls the buckle out. She leverages the bottle under the metal buckaroo hanging on for dear life, slips the cap under the metal loop. When she snaps the lid off, Seth fake grunts as beer foam spills over her fingers.

 

She expresses her gratitude by tipping her bottle against his. “You’re just a saint, aren’t you?”

 

He pats his lap, and she rolls her eyes but takes a seat on his knee anyway. “You never humor me this much. Maybe I should get shot more often.” She gives him a look, and he smiles. “What, too soon?”

 

She changes the subject. “What’ve you been doing all day?”

 

“Counting.” He takes a pull off his beer and side-eyes another RV crawling by them on the highway shoulder, scoping out a place to park for the night.

 

“Counting?”

 

“Yeah, counting.” He turns his attention back to her once the RV continues on down the road.

 

She rubs at the scruff under his chin, reminds herself to give him a shave while subtly checking his pulse, assured when it is steady and well-timed. “How high can you count?”

 

He presses his mouth to the lip of the bottle, refuses to look at her, and she can tell he is forcing himself not to smile. “Two million.” She raises her eyes at him. “And that’s just what’s in the Winnebago.”

 

She wants to smile back. She wants to ask him what now. She wants to ask him if he can stop. But, she takes away his empty beer and gives him hers, leans in like she is imparting a secret and tells him, “You need a bath.” She sets the empty down on the hard, packed clay bottom of the dry lake bed.

 

He drops his beer in the cupholder so he can tuck her hair back behind her ears. “Oh yeah, princess, you gonna sponge me down?” His free hand grazes down her shoulder blade, and he notices skin scraped and raw.

 

“Is that a request?” She flicks thumb and forefinger against his gauche belt-buckle to catch his attention. “No please?”

  

* * *

 

 

She wakes up and hears them in the bathroom together, starts to crawl across the twisted sheets but the sleep is still tugging on her eyes and she flattens at the foot of the bed. 

 

Seth taps the razor against the sink, carefully draws the blade up from Adam’s apple to the point of his chin. “I’m saying the domino effect is bigger with cops,” he argues at the fogged-up mirror. He drops the razor in the sink and reaches up to pop the vent open. “They’re like bloodhounds when you kill one of their own.”

 

Richie’s compacted in the shower and he raises his voice over the static. “That’s a load. The domino effect is way bigger with criminals. Cops aren’t going to go after your family, man. They call it organized crime for a reason, brother, networks and families and all that shit. Don’t pretend like you don’t know this. Criminals can play dirty. Cops have to toe the line.”

 

“You kill one cop, it’s like you’ve killed all cops. Or do you not remember the Lone Ranger putting a bullet in you? _Send those boys to hell, Frederico_ , and all that bullshit.” Seth nicks under his bottom lip and thinks maybe he should’ve let Kate do it. She’s a steadier hand and he’s still a hair shy of all-together.

 

The pipes hitch and thump when the water shuts off, and Richie whips the shower curtain aside. “Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

 

Seth presses a small slip of tissue paper to the cut. “No promises, brother.” And though he knows Richie isn’t referring to shaving mistakes, he means it both ways.

 

She pulls open the accordion door, and both their heads turn in tandem to see their little runaway standing there in nothing but a tank top and cotton panties, rocking back and forth on her heels. “I need to go.” She stops rocking to bend over and pull up one of her socks, pilling and white with baby blue polka dots.

 

“Do I get that sponge bath now?” Seth wonders as Richie shoulders around him, towel wrapped around his waist.

 

“You’re doing a real hatchet job on your face there.”  She steps inside the tiny bathroom and maneuvers around Seth. Unceremoniously, she shimmies out of her panties and sits on the toilet. “Give me the razor and you’ll get out of this without any more bumps or scrapes.” 

 

* * *

 

 

The days start so cold out here before giving way to the heat in mid-afternoon, but there are still patches of snow littered across the tip-tops of the Steens. Spring clings to this place, and she likes that. It keeps the flowers around longer. It is the only time when the desert feels alive.

 

She coaxes Seth out of bed early, whispers in his ear that she’d kill for a hot bath. He tells her he can’t drive yet. “Teach me stick.” She barely gets out the last word before he kisses her, the _ick_ caught in her throat.

 

Richie came back later than usual from feeding in Burns and passed out on the couch. He hasn’t tried to feed from her since they first came to the playa. He hasn’t tried to touch her since the lodge. Seth nearly shakes him awake to tell him to take the bed, but she says let him sleep. Privately she thinks, let him sulk.

 

When they step down from the trailer, the sun is just peeking over the distant mesas on the other side of the playa. Broken gray clouds scattered overhead and Kate feels a cool mist against her cheeks, her shoulders.

 

She gives Seth an appreciative onceover from behind as he unlocks the cougar, black jeans and western-style button up he picked up in Burns. “I like you both better like this, less creep missionaries, more mysterious cowboy.”

 

“Well, you gotta blend,” he reasons, shifts his shoulders like he’s wearing someone else’s skin. The two never look more comfortable than when they’re suited up, a full, fitted three-piece. “You got a thing for cowboys, princess?”

 

“Don’t all girls have a thing for cowboys? My momma warned me about falling for a cowboy.”

 

“There’s a Waylon Jennings song for that, right?” He opens the driver door for her.

 

She sing-songs her way into the driver’s seat. “Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.” And he laughs.

 

He takes his seat on the passenger side and offers her the keys. When she reaches for them, he closes his fist around them. “Okay, sweetheart, first thing to know about driving manual is it’s all about timing. You got your clutch pedal on the far left, brake middle, and gas far right. You gotta time pressing the clutch to shift and then releasing the clutch at the same time you give it gas. There’s this nice sweet spot between the switch from clutch to gas, but you have to feel for it,” he starts, and her mind is already spinning. “Following me here, princess?”

 

“Wait, what’s on the left?”

 

“Okay, let’s start slow. Put your left foot on the far-left pedal, that’s the clutch. Put your right foot on the far-right pedal, that’s the gas. Middle pedal is brake. Only use your right foot on the gas and the brake. Reserve lefty for the clutch. It’s a learning curve, using both hands and feet to drive, but if you’re like me, you like the control, like shaking hands with your car.” He grabs her hand and curls her fingers around the shifter. “Okay, now here’s your shifter. Let’s get a feel for the gear box.” He pulls the parking brake up, pushes the key in the ignition but doesn’t turn the engine over, replaces his hand over hers on the shifter. “We’re sitting pretty in neutral with the parking brake on. That’s so we don’t go rolling around. But for now, we’re gonna learn where our gears are at. See this cute little diagram here on the shifter,” he says, prying both their hands off to look at the H with the R pitched off the left side. “Press down on the clutch. Hold it. One through four and the R is reverse. Straight-forward, right? No. You have to feel where those suckers are at in the gear box, so you don’t make the mistake of moving to a gear you don’t mean. But, this is easier, neutral sits in the center here and you just have to move up for first, down for second, right up for third, right down for fourth, far left and down for reverse.” As he lists them, he moves their hands over the shifter so she can feel where the gears click into place. “Here’s the kicker, it’s awful hard to keep glancing at your shifter while you’re driving to make sure you’re going where you’re supposed to be going, so remember where your gears are.”

 

He moves the shifter to neutral, shows her how to jostle it just so to know it’s in neutral, before twisting the key in the ignition. “I’m going to release the parking brake.” He presses the button, drops the brake, and the car rolls forward, the needle barely nudging over zero. “Now, you’re going to press down on the clutch, and we are going to shift into first. After we shift into first, gently, slowly, release the clutch and press the gas. Do it slow.” She presses the clutch with her left foot, and he tells her to keep going, floor it. Her leg is already cramping, but she presses down, and he must know when she is just far enough in that he jerks their hands up into first. “Now switch slow.” But, she doesn’t, and the cougar lurches and stalls. She gives him a look expecting his disappointment, but he chuckles, settles the shifter back into neutral and twists the keys in the ignition. “Okay, again. We’ll keep doing this ‘til you get it right.” It takes another two stalls before she gets the cougar rolling in first, and he tells her to press the clutch again while releasing the gas, quickly pulls the shifter down into second, and prompts her to switch to gas. The car’s roll stutters a little, but she gets the gas going and it picks up into the double-digits.

 

“Well, I’ll be honest,” he says, gives her hand around the shifter a squeeze. “I thought you wouldn’t make it to second on the first try.”

 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

 

He’s trying to smother a smile, and she can’t tell if it’s pride or amusement, probably both. “Real test is getting this puppy into third, but I’m gonna help you get there. Feel me move the shifter over, and you remember what that feels like. Clutch.” She presses the clutch while releasing the gas, and he moves the shifter up and right and up again. She releases the clutch and eases back onto the gas smoother this time, and Seth releases her hand to ruffle her hair. “You’re a natural, princess.”

 

She wants to tell him his praise is premature, because she keeps them in third gear the whole way to the hot springs, floating down the highway at a cozy forty miles per hour, until he has to help her shift back down to second. But, she finds her way to first and turns into the empty lot for the hot springs, accidentally stalls and leaves the cougar in the middle of the lot.

 

Seth stares meaningfully at the fifty feet between the car and the general store. “Good enough.”

 

* * *

 

 

Seth unbuckles the sling and sets it on top of his jeans. She offers to help him out of his shirt, but he smirks and pops open the mother-of-pearl snaps in one fell swoop. His whole right shoulder is wrapped up in fresh bandages, and she sees the bulge of gauze underneath, feels a pinch of guilt as he winces the rest of the way out of his shirt. She would probably survive a bullet better, probably should have taken the one the good doctor pulled out of him in pieces. But, he tucked her behind him as he took the shot, born more from habit than necessity now, and he was always like that even back then, without thought placing himself between the muzzle and what used to be the fragile parts of her. She knows without a doubt he would have done the same if he’d been there that night by the platform.

 

He sits on the side with his legs dangling in the water. She slides in first, easing into the steaming pool with her hands gripping the wooden platform, hissing when her cold skin touches the water. But, he peels the fingers of one hand off the platform, and she dumps into the tub.

 

“Being an invalid doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole,” she bites, threatening to splash him.

 

“That’s for pussy-footing the gearbox earlier, princess.” He slips into the pool next to her, takes a seat on one of the cement stools submerged in the water with his bum arm resting on the edge.

 

She sprawls halfway out of the pool, her stomach bent over the edge, to reach for the bottled water she bought from the general store. Seth lets his eyes graze over her backside, from the wings of her shoulder blades around the arch of her spine, settles on her peach ass peeking out of the water, bikini bottoms riding up and each cheek flushed from the heat and steam. He notices the scrapes are gone from her shoulders. She hands him an unopened bottle of water, and he glances at her wrists. His brush with death has made him more aware of her, he thinks, and all the things missing on her body.

 

He is pretty much falling apart at the seams, and she looks fixed in time. Everyone around him flash-frozen, and every day something on him breaking, some new malady catching up with him. The near constant dog whistle pitch in his ears that when he recognized it for the first time he thought Richie was fucking with him, searched his brother’s pockets until he realized the sound was inside his head. His ears can’t register higher tones like they used to, and she is already soft spoken as it is. And it isn’t just the dulling of his senses, but he can feel it working its way through his bones, percolating through the joints and tendons, one too many beatings and all the scrapes accelerating what should have taken decades to find him.

 

“I never killed anyone before the bank in Abilene,” he admits for the first time.

 

“You’re telling me this now?” She wonders, uncapping the water.

 

“Something about you makes me want to confess my sins.” He wipes sweat off his brow, and she reaches across the wooden platform for one of the towels they brought, places it over his shoulder to catch any sweat or steam and keep it off his bandages. Her anticipation rubs at the tender spot he’s kept for her, an affection he sometimes called an infection. “Richie was always into that when we were kids, communion.”

 

“Makes sense.”

 

“Yeah?” He’s wondering why she thinks so, but she doesn’t quite know how to word it. Arrogance isn’t her strong suit anyway, and she can’t tell Seth about his brother’s tendency to eat her out and feed from her while quoting the bible, something that always manages to both please and piss her off because he knows it gets her closer faster, to getting off or to God she won’t say. But she isn’t a saint and God never feels farther away than when she’s in his hands.

 

“It never made sense to me,” Seth fills in when she doesn’t divulge.

 

“That he would like communion?” Because to Richie it felt like a violation, not an act of reverence or deference. He didn’t do it to mend his bond with God; he did it to consume Him. Tearing down gods, she knows he still has designs on becoming one. He’s just subtler about it now.  “If I’m your confessional, what’s the sacrament?”

 

“I’ve got some ideas,” Seth offers, his eyes skirting just under the surface of the water.

 

“Don’t default to dirty like your brother,” she admonishes, splashing him lightly with water. She settles for a spot next to him, her arms laid out across the platform and her legs floating out behind her. “I don’t hold it against you anymore.”

 

“What?”

 

“If we’re in confession,” she clarifies. “For leaving me in Mexico.”

 

He crinkles the plastic bottle in his left hand. “I thought we let bygones be bygones.” He tosses the water bottle near his pile of clothes.

 

She flattens her palms against the platform warming in the sun, her cheek pressed to the wooden slats. “I know why you did it now.”

 

“Oh yeah, why?” He turns around and places his hands flat on the platform by hers, but it’s an effort to straighten out his right arm.

 

“That guy, the one who killed Rafa, he came after you because of Richie.”

 

“So?”

 

“You were perfectly fine with dragging me into your bullshit. And let’s be honest, your bullshit was pretty manageable for the most part. I guess Richie’s brand of bullshit, not so much. You were trying to – I don’t know, protect me.”

 

Seth studies his hands for a moment, then turns to her with a customary smirk. “Maybe I was just pissed off at having to babysit a teenager for every job we pulled.”

 

She smiles like he’s perfectly predictable. “Yeah, you’re good at playing that game.”

 

“What game’s that?”

 

She rolls her body to the side and slides out of the pool, lies back on the warm platform with her legs churning circles in the steaming pool. “Making me out to be a kid so you don’t feel guilty.”

 

“Guilty?”

 

Sweat beads out across his forehead, across his upper lip, and she is tempted to lick it off. Sometimes he is too easy to look at, devil-may-care attractive that she wonders what he was like on the day he became aware of it for the first time. She sits up and leans towards him, her lips tickling his ear. “For being a bad man.”

 

He pulls back to eye her sideways. “Sure I never had a problem with being a villain, sweetheart.”

 

“Who checks out the ass of a teenager,” she finishes and slides back into the pool, adjusts her bikini bottoms under the water.

 

* * *

 

 

She wakes up curled on her side in the front seat of the cougar, Seth’s jacket draped over her. The keys are still in the ignition, and it takes a while for her eyes to focus, absorb the blue dream glow from the radio. Some fifties heartthrob croons softly from the speakers, and she floats to a seated position, skirts her eyes around the cougar for Seth. Both the passenger and driver doors are open. She itches at a mosquito bite on her bare ankle and calls for Seth, gets no answer. A train shrieks in the distance, and she calls for him again, tumbles out of the passenger seat. Her eyes adjust to the twilight, and she finally spies him laid across the train tracks, his head balanced on the rail. She bends forward and reaches into the car for the volume dial on the radio, turns it up just enough.

 

“Do you need some company?” she wonders, an echo from that morning after, stumbling out into the sunlight on legs still unsteady with the new reality of their lives.

 

He studies her standing by the tracks under the dim red light of the train crossing, cowboy boots, daisy cut-outs scattered across the hem of her cotton dress and his jacket swallowing her up. “It’s tough to say no to you,” he admits, and pats the space next to him. He has a flask of something in his left hand, something to soften the blow of the cheap beer he’s been drinking since they left the Narrows where he picked up a sixer.

 

He took over the wheel when they left the RV park, arguing he couldn’t take one more minute of her student-driver routine, and she admired him drive stick one-handed, laughed when he said it was all in the thighs as he used his knees to control the steering wheel while he shifted with his left hand, looking twisted up for a moment while he did so and ignoring the miserable pull in his stitches. She helped him shift a few times. She forgets sometimes that Seth is a southpaw, shoots lefty, and it’s startling to see someone so comfortable with what’s always felt like the wrong side of things for everyone else.

 

She shifts her shoulders under his jacket, and he tells her to lie down on it. “I’ve already ruined enough of your clothes.”

 

When she gets settled next to him, he offers her a pull from the flask, but she shakes her head. The steel rail is ice against the back of her neck, but his shoulder is warm against hers. The train whistle flares up again, and in her mind’s eye, she can see the black plume disappearing in black velvet somewhere off in the desert. She clicks her heels in time with the sweet dreams over the radio, and Seth casually works his way to tipsy.

 

Coyotes echo one another from mesa to mesa, and Seth tilts his head back over the rail, howls back. She makes a joke that he gets loopy on pain meds, but he tells her he stopped taking them. As he calls to the coyotes again, she presses two fingers to his neck arched over the rail, feels the vibrations from his howl, senses his heart still there. He smirks and tells her, “Still ticking, sweetheart.” She’s caught. She’s checked his pulse more than a dozen times since they arrived on the playa.

 

“They’re calling you home,” she says, referring to the pack searching for each other in the dark.

 

Seth’s eyes leave hers for something over her shoulder, and she turns her head, sees the coyote parallel with the tracks studying them. “Whoops.” There’s another skirting the cougar but keeps a safe fifteen feet. Seth gives a weak howl, and one of them ducks his head confused. The other fusses, whines, until the train shrieks and they both bolt back into the desert.

 

Seth watches them go and wonders what makes their eyes glow like that. She tells him their eyes are that color in the dark because of something called the tapetum lucidum, to help with night vision.

 

He cuts himself off mid-sip and looks at her. “How’d you know that?”

 

“Richie told me. It means bright tapestry.” He snorts and takes a pull off the flask. “Strangely beautiful, huh.” She reaches for his wrist, pulls it across to take a sip, whiskey sweet and hot that warms on the way down.

 

He has smiling eyes even in the dark. And they keep smiling even when he tells her it’s the anniversary of Uncle Eddie’s death. When he says this, he pours a shot between two tracks. She asks if they should head back, but he tells her not just yet.

 

She barters for another sip of whiskey, her jaw locks against the burn in her throat for a moment before the liquor numbs everything it touches. “Send me home. I’m thinking of going home,” she sings to herself, voice a little rougher with the liquor sharp on her tongue.

 

“All you gotta do is click your heels, Dorothy.” For him, home is wherever his brother happens to be, she thinks. Somehow that is starting to become her truth, too, the way in which she orients herself to reality.

 

Would it happen like magic? Her past year has felt like some strange and sweet awful dream, would she suddenly wake up buried under her down comforter, white with pale pink roses and smelling like home, like being young and the lavender fabric softener her mother uses. Sometimes she gets flashes of it early in the morning, cracks her eyes just right and thinks its her room in Bethel, beany babies punctuating the lines of books on her walls, sunlight through leaded glass and her mother tapping on her door. She never knocked; she tapped.

 

But, then things come into focus and she’s tangled between two hard places and there are hollow points scattered across the nightstand next to folded up mission control glasses and a zippo leaking lighter fluid. Her head rises and falls with Seth’s breathing and Richie’s got his big hand wrapped possessively around her thigh.

 

“We had to wait for Eddie’s parole to be up, when he got out of the halfway house, before we could go live with him.” She turns on her side, balances her head on her fist while she listens to him. “He was still in prison when dad died, on fraud charges. No family would take us, so we had to wait it out in the group home for two years. There were a few fosters, but for the most part we stayed there.” She notices he neglects to say when Richie offed dear old dad.

 

“I almost got adopted at one point. I was just playing nice and almost ended up some family’s new kid. They were a nice family, you know. Kind of reminded me a little of yours, church on Sundays, family dinners, weekend soccer games and barbeques and all that other suburban bullshit. Papers were drawn up and everything, and Richie, Jesus, he was ready to do something real stupid. He was already on thin ice in the group home.” He swirls the last of the whiskey, mulls it over. “So, I beat the shit out of their son.” Downs the last shot.

 

He stops talking, reaches over and tucks the flask in the inner pocket of his jacket. She notices the hole in the right shoulder and sticks her index finger through it, wiggles it at him. “You don’t think about what-ifs.”

 

He nods. “I don’t.” Gruff. He is only thinking about how many times he passed up a good deal because of his brother, and how many times his brother failed to do the same. She is included somewhere in that running tally. “I would have fucked it up anyway. I was just getting there faster.”

 

“There isn’t much we wouldn’t do for family.”

 

Seth shimmies his arm up under her head, warmer than the rail, shifts her closer to him. “Your brother, my brother, it didn’t occur to them once.”

 

“What do you mean?” She asks but she can guess at what he is talking about. She never knew.

 

“When you were playing out the last exorcism.” She nods once, slow. “At some point we both decided we couldn’t,” he confides in her. “And you know, I’m sorry but sometimes I think it was the stupid thing to do. It worked out in the end, but there were moments where I didn’t think it was worth it.” They couldn’t fold their hand when she was in the deck.

 

“I know I did some bad things.”

 

“Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart. I don’t hold any of it against you. It wasn’t you. Hell, we deserved it.” He curls his hand along her shoulder, pulls her closer. “It was all the others.”

 

She doesn’t know how to say it wasn’t just Amaru, ninety percent sure but the other ten, there were certain things she did because she wanted to, because it made her feel good to inflict that suffering, made her feel safe to do so, to cash in on her hate and send it where it ought to go. For a moment, she let herself be the hand of God, and though now it feels like a sin, then it felt righteous.

 

“So, you thought about it, about – putting me down?”

 

He keeps his grip firm on her shoulder. “When you say it like that.” Like she was a rabid dog, and he can’t help thinking about poor Peaches, Richie’s German shepherd, an analogy he made himself. And Richie smiling dumbly at the mention of his long-lost pup, wires tripped when Seth admits he shot the poor thing. He knew the comparison would sour quickly with his brother. It soured for him, too.

 

He couldn’t fold on her even when it would have been easier. His brother never even considered passing on the hand, but he did, he asked the question. He wonders about that now. That hell bitch was a world ender, and even the little girl inside of her was in forfeit, begging for the end, yet Scott, Richie, just the suggestion set them off. Maybe he would have felt differently had he been there that night. But he wasn’t, and it became clear to him after that. It shames him a little to think it, to think that was what it took, a girl dying, Eddie dying, to realize they were only as good when they were together.

 

“But you didn’t. You never even tried. You tried everything but,” she reasons. “And what? You think you get a penalty for thinking about it?”

 

“No.” He lets her scoot closer, her head on his shoulder close enough he can smell the shampoo they all share, and it is still odd to smell them on her, that it has become too easy to just let her fold herself into their lives. No, the penalty came when he told Burt to do the deed, when he sloughed off a responsibility that should have been his if he willed it. But, she was always right, before and during and after. He was a coward. And he can say he is keeping her around to make up for all the times he dropped the ball with her, but if he is being honest, he is trying to make up for his own cowardice. If he digs deeper than that, making amends is just another excuse to pair up with his deficiencies in courage, because honest he just likes having her around. She is easy even when she is prickly; pleasant even when she is bitter, and somehow always new. Richie would say it is because she is nothing like the usual Nancy Spungen types he is prone to shacking up with, or maybe it is because she is young and forgivable, though he has no business proffering forgiveness to anyone given the extent of his rap sheet of transgressions.

 

“Let’s get going, huh, rough rider?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before standing up, offering a hand to help him. He lets her help pull him up, lets her drape his jacket on his shoulders. “There, now you look more like yourself.” He thumbs her nose playfully before slinging his arm along her shoulders and guiding her towards the cougar. His fingers curl around the warm knob of her shoulder, pulls her close to press his lips briefly to the space behind her ear. Her forgiveness is a simple kind of magic for him, something that sets his blood at ease.

 

When they get to the cougar, he asks if she can get them home. “Sure thing, cowboy,” she says, helping ease him into the passenger seat, but before he can swing his legs into the car, she drops to the ground, saves her knees on the tops of his boots.

 

She reaches for his belt, but he gets one of her hands in his. “Are you doing this because you feel sorry for me?” Not like he hasn’t thought about it. Not like he hasn’t accepted a pity blow before.

 

“If I say yes, will you tell me to stop?”

 

“Fair enough.”

 

She starts to undo his belt buckle, the ridiculously large metal plate with ‘ _Let ‘er buck_ ’ printed over the buckaroo about to be thrown from his bronco. She looks up at him through dark eyelashes and smiles soft, a little nervous.

 

His curiosity is getting in between her mouth and his dick, but there is a part of him that knows if he doesn’t find out now, it will be all he thinks about when she starts. “Hey, when did you start up with Richie?”

 

She isn’t surprised in the least he would take the conversation in that direction. She’s witnessed and broken up enough pissing contests between the two of them. “You want the gory details?”

 

“Maybe spare me some of the more grisly bits?”  

 

“Some things feel pretty inevitable,” she admits. ” Richie was just one of those things.” It’s not much of an answer, but she isn’t really sure when it started with Richie. She doesn’t know the where or the when, if she could draw the line at that moment in the backroom of the Twister. And there is a wealth of almost-memories she cannot trust, things that might have been real but probably weren’t. All she can say is that Richie was going to happen, did happen, more will happen – inevitable.

 

He is sheepish on the next part and she tries to recall if she ever saw Seth shy. “Inevitable, huh?”

 

“Are you worried about sloppy seconds?”

 

He opens his mouth to quip but comes up dry, closes and opens his mouth looking like a fish out of water.

 

“You want another dose of honesty, big brother?” She lets him gather her hair back behind her head, like he doesn’t want her thinking this is going any other way. She smiles, wants to roll her eyes but resists, instead confides to him, “You were part of the plan, Stan.” He smothers a smile, tamps down on his ego.

 

She starts to drag his zipper down. “You know, I’ve never done this before.”

 

“Wait, what? Really?” He seems genuinely surprised Richie never got this far with her. But, she figures he should know by now Richie has never been much of a closer, content with their mutual masturbation club, but really it is because he wants her to ask for it, beg for it. It has been one of the longest and most twisted games of chicken she has ever played with anybody.

 

“I mean, I’ve watched,” she admits, and he raises his eyebrows, unsure what to do with that information. “And assisted.” She slips her fingers under the waistband of his jockeys while he wraps his head around what she confesses to him. “Really he is just softening me up.”

 

“Is that what you’re doing to me?”

 

“I hope not.” Even as she says it, evidence to the contrary presents itself. He rakes his fingers gently down her scalp, and she mms. “I like that. Keep doing that.”

 

She peels down his jockeys, and he lifts his hips a little to help her shimmy them down just enough. Her elbows balanced on his thighs, she takes him into her palms. She slides her thumb up over the head, catches it when the side of his mouth twitches, halfway smile, mostly anticipation.

 

“Got a few tips,” he starts, but falters when her lips slip over the head of his cock. Cut off, he inhales sharply. “And tricks.” A shaky exhale. “Just be careful. With your teeth.”

 

She pops off, strokes up and down once just to keep him slightly off kilter. “What, do I look like a biter?”

 

No, but he knows Richie is, and he doesn’t know what kind of bad habits she might have picked up along the way.

 

His fingers glide back down her crown, blunted nails scraping, and she shivers, takes him into her mouth again, and he thinks he might be through with the commentary. Figures he might just let her have her way instead, even if she doesn’t know what she is doing down there, wants to watch her work it out on her own, see what she’ll do. After watching her tiptoe the gearbox earlier, he places his own personal bets, chokes on them when she chokes on him, gags, her throat constricting around his cock, and he has to force himself not to tug on her hair the wrong way, let her come up for air.

 

Her mouth falls away, but she keeps both hands busy. “Sorry,” she mumbles.

 

He grazes her scalp again from crown to nape, massages the base of her neck. “I didn’t mind,” he tells her, suggestion subtle.

 

“Did you like that?”

 

“Yeah, but don’t force yourself.”

 

She takes him in to her mouth again, and he lets his head fall to the side against the seat headrest, controlled exhales long and slow. She is starting to pick up the cues, his fingers carding through her hair like unsaid gold stars, a twist of her tongue here, a dip of her head there. She tries to see how long she can hold him there as far back as he can go, hears him mutter sweet Jesus before pulling back. His thigh tense under her hand, relaxes when she comes up for a breath.

 

He is starting to lose coherence, sense, his hand reflexively keeping her grounded, dick buried in the back of her throat, and she reminds him to let her go by digging her nails just above his hipbone. He apologizes by massaging her neck, her scalp again, but he is edging closer. Angel eyes half-lidded, he doesn’t stop watching her.

 

When she takes another plunge, she doesn’t anticipate it, hears him try to warn her before something spills, slides down the back of her throat. She pulls back but keeps her lips wrapped around the head, finishes him off, his cock twitching in her hands. His stomach shudders, and she clamps her thighs together when she feels the cool night air make her realize how wet she is under the skirt of her sundress.

 

Her knees slid off the tops of his boots sometime during, pea gravel embedded in her shins, but he looks too damn satisfied for her to care much about the discomfort.

 

She comes away, and his hand cradles her jawline, thumb smoothing along her bottom lip. He peels her lip down, and she opens her mouth. “Did you swallow?” His voice is rough, like that night in Barstow after the movie, and it tickles in her lower belly, winds her up.

 

She pecks his thumb, bites the tip of it. “Was I not supposed to?”

 

His lips curve upwards, eyelids heavy but eyes still smiling. “Aren’t you a card.”

 

* * *

 

 

When they get back to the RV, all the lights are out. The steps drop when Seth opens the door, and Kate notices the door fits the frame when she closes it behind her.

 

In the moonlight, she can barely make out Richie sprawled on the bed, his feet dangling off the edge. Seth heel toes his way to the bed like he is practicing for a drunk driving test, failing, falls face first onto the bed next to Richie.

 

Tossing the car keys onto the kitchen counter, she hears them hit something not porcelain, something crinkling. She flips on the small light under the microwave, and there are a couple plastic grocery bags on the counter. Peeking inside, fresh bandages and gauze for Seth in one, a bulk pack of socks in the other, size small.

 

She hears Seth flip himself on the bed, the springs creaking and Richie grumbling.

 

Grabbing the socks, she steals into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Whiskey and cum leaving a bad aftertaste, she decides. With the toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, she tears into the new socks. Kicking off her boots, she removes the pair she has on, holes in the heels. She picks a new pair, sunflower print and soft cotton, and they fit snug, just right.

 

Padding out, she hears Seth rambling about some past heist, catches the mention of Uncle Eddie, the first job he ever gave the brothers. Richie is pulling off Seth’s boots while his brother chatters on.

 

She pulls her dress overhead, stuffs it in the empty clothes hamper. A productive day for Richard Gecko, she thinks to herself when she finds a clean shirt for once, shrugs it on.

 

Seth is finishing his story, his imaginary toast to Uncle Eddie Cruickshank, and Richie is listening, nodding, still groggy. When Seth reaches his hand out, Richie knows, grasps it, and it is easy, seamless, the glide into double pistols when they swear to getting rich and fat, to dying in the arms of a beautiful woman. Seth is already slurring into sleep, fading off on the last bit of their ritual. Richie lays his brother’s hand down, pats his good shoulder.

 

She crawls onto the bed, finds the one sliver of space left available between them, Seth sprawled on one half, Richie curled on his side on the other. Sometimes sleeping with them reminds her of those old photographs of children in tenements or sleeping on fire escapes in summer, packed like sardines to escape the heat. She is grateful to be small then, squeezing in like the runt of the litter.

 

But, she isn’t tired. She feels the exhaustion in her limbs, the need for sleep but lacking the want.

 

She studies the shadows across Richie’s black, the sharp contrast of his shoulder blades against the gentler relief of his deltoids, the sweep of his lats and traps. His muscles are not as clearly defined as Seth’s, and maybe it is because he can get away with more, can make up for it in height, in all the extras that come with being a snake.

 

Seth snores softly behind her.  She slides her socked foot along Richie’s calf, and his shoulders shift as he turns over.

 

He looks different without his glasses, older, meaner, and maybe it is because the thick frames obscure the heavy brow, soften it somehow. Or maybe he just looks mean because he feels mean. She feels it.

 

“Thanks for the socks,” she whispers.

 

“Your old ones were falling apart. One came apart in the wash,” he reasons, gives nothing away.

 

She reaches for him, her hands curling over his shoulders, but he is stiff, unforgiving. “Thanks for doing the laundry.”

 

“I’m good like that aren’t I? Picking up the slack.” And it bites. He is mocking her. Since the tunnel, it’s been like drawing blood from a stone. Somehow, he makes her feel like the asshole. 

 

She is about to turn over, but he grabs her around the waist, reels her in like a fish on a hook when she squirms a little. “I like them,” she tells him, about the socks, before he is kissing her, shutting her up, because of course she likes the socks. His hand is braced along her lower back, palm burning against her spine, and she is still wound up from before, from getting on her knees for Seth, wonders if he catches the aftertaste of his brother on her tongue.

 

She feels him half-hard through his boxer briefs, and there isn’t much left to buffer the space between them anymore. He kisses a sloppy line down the side of her mouth, her cheek, her jaw line, tendon to clavicle, and she guides him there with her palm cradling the back of his head.

 

“Go ahead,” she whispers to him when he grazes his teeth near the juncture between neck and shoulder, her version of an olive branch, but she can only admit to herself how much she wants him to.

 

Seth mumbles something and rearranges himself on the bed, mattress shifting, springs creaking. Richie presses his forehead under her chin, exhales rough against her clavicle and starts to pull away. She tries to get him to stay, go on, it is okay, but something shifts in his demeanor when she says that, something cold and dark and killer still in his eye.

 

She sits up and watches him pull his slacks on, shrug into a clean, ironed shirt. He gives her a onceover before he leaves, glances at his brother dead to the world, back to her, tears her apart with just that look. She doesn’t know why she should feel like the asshole.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, I’m piss-poor at driving stick. But, if I had to do it in a pinch, I’d stall about three times before finally getting into second gear, but good luck getting me past that without choking. My ability to time the switch between clutch and gas pedal is god-awful, but I made the mistake of learning manual wearing steel-toe boots in a bottom-tier Ford with a temperamental clutch. (I know. Excuses, excuses.)


	6. walking in the shadow of the big man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from a Guadalcanal Diary song, Fear of God. 
> 
> Fear of God by Guadalcanal Diary  
> This Night Has Opened my Eyes by the Smiths  
> Counting Sheep by Shakey Graves  
> Wolfman Agenda by Shakey Graves
> 
> This escalates quickly, I think. More references made to another fic, which I realize I am drawing quite a bit of plot tension from, if there is a plot.

The pair of horses stand shoulder to shoulder, their necks extended over the fence line as they push their muzzles into her hands. She split an apple and offered them each a half, careful not to let her fingers get caught in their teeth. As the two eat their treat, they let her run her hands along their necks. Like petting velvet over steel, she thinks. When they look at her with their perceptive eyes, reserved yet aware, she misses her own filly Cinnamon, feels the pinch of nostalgia when their muzzles go searching for another apple somewhere in her hands, but she laughs. “I only brought the one, fellas.”

 

She figures her father must have sold Cinnamon before they left. Or maybe he just did nothing. Let the stables sell her or take her.

 

Their ears twist left, nostrils flaring, heads raising. Richie leans against the fence, reads their apprehension and keeps his distance. The horses nicker. The chestnut nuzzles his brother, a gorgeous dark bay, both beautiful stock horses with identical white crescents down the length of their muzzles.

 

“You know being pie-bald is a sign of domesticity,” he tells her. He is wearing that stupid hat again, the white wide-brim he picked up at some point. It is late afternoon and the sun is almost behind the Steens that he can get away with walking around. He tells her he would rather die than be pie-bald. There is nothing worse.

 

Maybe that is why he and Santanico didn’t work. Neither likes being tethered down, domesticated, owned. But she thinks privately, he might say so, but she knows better. _Los Hermanos Geckos_ get off on being known, on running up scores and all the underworldly respect that comes with it. He and his brother are defined by their name, and they need it to mean something. For that, they need to belong to one another, because what is one without the other.

 

He is trying to punish her, but now she knows he is really punishing himself. He was half-joking in the tunnel, but it got away from him. It always gets away from him, and he says and does stupid shit. They are both still smarting from what they have done to each other, what they have taken from each other, and she is waiting to get over it. She doesn’t know how much more she should give, how much more she is prepared to give. She gives with one though he takes and takes and the other giving while she cautiously reciprocates, because somehow it always feels like there are strings attached, a catch, a play, a selfishness. With one it is a glide and the other always friction.  

 

She doesn’t know what Seth wants and that comforts her, the easy ambiguity of his affection, the lack of expectation.

 

She knows what he wants and that scares her. He just wants to see what she’ll do. He just wants to get inside. Everything he does to her feels like a test, and most of the time she is fifty-fifty between wanting to fail, wanting to pass. She figures, though, it goes both ways. She pushes; he prods. He plays to the devil inside her and she resent him for it, sometimes.

 

Sometimes she feels her presence creates more problems than it solves. Both would still say and do stupid shit with or without her, but she knows having her around tempers some of that volatility. However, they were a well-oiled machine to begin with, the Gecko brothers. Tacking on a third wheel may have thrown their gears out of whack. The hole in Seth’s shoulder might be proof of that.

 

“Where’s Seth?” The chestnut nuzzles her shoulder, and she strokes her hand down his neck, marvels at the solidity of the creature, the unpredictable sinew that twitches under her fingers.

 

“Sleeping.”

 

He is doing that a lot lately, sleeping again. After the night by the train tracks, he wouldn’t get up until the following evening. She tried to coax him out of bed for something to eat, but he tried to grab her, pull her down to join him.

 

“You can’t sleep all the time,” she told him, and he asked for his meds, admitted his shoulder was killing him. Maybe he got going too soon, too much too soon, barely over a week since he was laid out on the veterinarian’s table. She checked his bandages and found blood seeping through the gauze. Richie sat on the arm chair near the front of the RV watching her wrap his brother’s shoulder in fresh bandages, feed him antibiotics and pain pills, and gingerly guide him back onto the bed. Her fingers grazing along Seth’s scalp, singing Waylon Jennings until he fell back asleep. By the last verse, she heard the cougar’s wheels spinning on gravel before hitting the pavement.

 

She waited in his place, curled up in the arm chair staring out across the playa. Hours later, she woke up on the bed in her sleep clothes. Seth out cold but breathing. Richie standing at the open door to the RV smoking a cigarette in his shirtsleeves. The lamp on above his head that she could make out the arterial sprays across the right half of his button-up. He feeds more now that his brother is down for the count again, more now that he won’t take anything from her.

 

She slid off the mattress and padded over to the arm chair, curled her bare legs up under her as she took a seat, her arms wrapped around herself against the damp coming through. “Hey.”

 

“I just put you there.” The bed, he meant.

 

 “I’ll sleep when you do.” The more his brother sleeps the less he does.

 

The horses bolt for the other side of the corral when Richie steps towards her. She grips the fence line and leans back, her bootheels grinding into the dirt.

 

“What? You blame me then?” She throws it out there. She has been meaning to ask since they got to the playa, but she was afraid of the answer.

 

“I just – there’s no rational reason I should.”

 

“But, you do. He wants to see me as I was, not as I am. It doesn’t mean he plays dumb, but he still reacts the same way. It’s instinctive for him. But all the money in the world isn’t going to change the fact he is dying.”

 

Richie stares out across the corral where the horses have positioned themselves in the middle facing opposite directions. She always thought they did that as a defense mechanism, but when she was learning to ride, her trainer told her it was to keep the flies off their faces. Somehow the defense explanation always made more sense, because even with their wide set eyes the rear is still most vulnerable. Maybe they just learned to kill two birds with one stone. She learned in school that wideset eyes indicate prey; forward facing eyes signal predator. Even predators look out for one another.

 

Richie curbs a sneer tugging at his upper lip, sucks his teeth. “Yeah, that’s his problem.” Because Richie cannot understand it. He doesn’t know why anyone would want to be human.  

 

The chestnut circles around his brother while he drinks from the trough, glances at her and Richie before taking a drink himself. She smiles briefly but it fades when she tells him, “He keeps me grounded. My guess is he keeps you grounded, too.

 

“You treated being human as a passing annoyance, while Seth – it is essential to him in a way he can’t explain. It can only be felt, that he is supposed to be finite.” Burned out like a star, a bang and then done. “I feel it, too, though. I know one day I will lose him, because while he’s got his curse to be finite, you and I will probably outlast these mountains.”

 

She is feeling it more and more lately. Before the Twister, she knew her end. What happened along the way was always beyond her, but she trusted it would end with God. And after, after the Twister, the platform, the church in Matanzas, her life spread out before her into eternity, an abyss of possibility that left her unsettled, and she was chagrined by the time without end in front of her. She felt cheated, condemned, stolen. “I think about Kisa. How she was raised in a jungle but ruled in a desert. Today these are mountains, a desert, but yesterday this was a lake. Today, three of us. Tomorrow two. Sometimes that’s as bad as one.”

 

“I’m not looking for an eternity with you, either,” he tries to hit back, but she flips his bullshit easy.

 

“You keep telling yourself that.”

 

“Sometimes it’s like you don’t even want to be here,” he says, accusing.

 

“Sometimes I don’t,” she tells him, simple, not meaning for it to bite, to hurt as much as it might. “You’re realizing you’re going to lose him. And maybe you’re afraid I won’t stick around if he’s gone.” How can she say it goes both ways without giving him too much? “Maybe you’re hoping I’ll stay as crazy as you are.” She watches it strike a nerve, a flicker of hurt before he defaults to killer still. She is pushing too far, she knows, but some things need to be said. Once.

 

She reflexively grabs her cross, her index smoothing along the engraved _INRI_ along the back, a nervous habit since grade school. When she lost Amaru, it was gone, and it didn’t register until days later when she reached for it, anxious when Seth was telling her they were going back to Houston and she didn’t know if that included her. It was gone, and she felt another piece of herself flutter into a karmic nothing space. Some part of her that she always imagined was irreplaceable, it just disappeared. And then months later Richie gave it back but never told her where he got it from.

 

“You never told me where you found my cross.” She asked, and he never answered, because anything he’d have said would have been a lie. But, she can guess where he found it or how it found its way to him. She is starting to trust in the hazy half-imaginations she saw through a blur of red, the dreams that were and were not. She is starting to realize some of these happened, that many of them happened even if they were just in her head, in his. “What did she promise you?”

 

“Everything.”

 

“What’s everything?”

 

“Everything.”

 

She chuckles, smiles sad at the end of it. “What’s it like having gods promise you the world and always falling through?”

 

He sets his hat on her head, adjusts it to sit level. “I’d ask you the same thing.” He clips the brim with thumb and forefinger and then walks away.

 

* * *

 

 What is her and what is not is beyond him, sometimes.

 

It is when he cannot retrace his steps that he falters, loses balance with all the missing spaces in his head, the dead space he cannot account for, the cruelties he isn’t sure he committed. He doesn’t know what to apologize for, and he doesn’t know if he should take responsibility for any of it. Half of what he feels for her feels surreal, half-imagined. Perhaps because what he felt for the other, for Kisa, most of that was in his head. Most of that felt planted. Maybe he let himself love her so he wouldn’t feel used. And maybe he is just a fucked-up Manchurian candidate when it comes to the women in his life.

 

Because she says things, offhand in the moment, that reverberate, that sting more than they should. He is starting to realize nothing that happened in the asylum was private, none of it just between himself and that hell bitch, that all of it exists somewhere inside her. He thought maybe they were just black boxes tucked away in her psyche, but then the words come and he knows it wasn’t just that queen. It is in those words, those offhand comments. She fucks with his head, he knows it. It was disorienting when Kisa wedged herself inside. She does it, too, a pull, a subliminal nudge, unintentional but no less disorienting.

 

She is his constant temptation, and even then, back before the Twister, he was suspicious of how attainable she seemed. He can usually smell a trap. And she was. She is. She is a long con honeypot, and he is knee deep in sticky sweet.  Judgment, temptation forgiveness – things he never gave much thought until the powers that be put her in front of him.

 

He cannot read her. He never could. Even by the pool, he could intuit her troubles, that was effortless. Reading people was always easy for him but reading her – he never anticipated a single thing she ever did. Asking him for a cigarette, sure, curious teenage girls did those things. Divulging her misgivings about her father, that was a mild curveball. The comment about picking up underage girls was a knuckler, but it amused him. Her easy intimacy throughout was what made him suspicious. He made people nervous, and even though he knew he set her on edge, she still reached for him, still sought him out, still cared enough to ask.

 

Just starting to feel sharp again, edges leveling with each mile gone by under the big beige bastard’s tires. _Set me free_ and his mind tumbled back into the rabbit hole. He could smell the tequila on her breath, but she wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t either. Unlike Seth, he never needed to get drunk or high to touch her. Never guilt for his actions, only what he was, unlike his brother.

 

He doesn’t know why he kept the cross as long as he had. He let it burn a hole in his pocket for months, and he only gave it back when he realized that is what she reached for when she was nervous, her security blanket.

 

 _It’s never been easy for you has it? Simple human connection._ His emotional capacities stunted, stubbornly selective, and he thought maybe she was too naïve to pick up on it, a domesticated animal that doesn’t know to be afraid of predators. But it wasn’t dumb innocence. It was compassion, naïve but genuine. The worst parts of him think corruptible, but even when she is at her meanest, her most spiteful, when she is still smarting and angry, she comes back, gets in the car, reaches across the mattress for him, speaks to him as if he is still just a man and not a monster. She doesn’t scare that easy.

 

Tasting something different on the back of her tongue and then her whispering that it was okay, okay, knocking around like rubber in his head, because she was there, she saw, she spoke to him. _No, you don’t. Not really. You probably never will._ Then he smells lighter fluid and wonders if he is still inside the nightmare. Did he ever leave? Her nightmares, his, they overlapped in the asylum. He wonders if they still do.

 

He just wanted to show her something interesting, but he felt it, too, sacrifices past. She followed him into the tunnel despite, and he debates whether it really is just unending compassion or childish curiosity. She follows him, and it is her end. How many times has he led her over the edge? Has he warped her? He tastes whispers of it in her blood all the time, voices that aren’t hers, mismatched memories. Then some phantom whispers to him and it sounds like _her_ , pitch distorted lower. _You’re going to lose everything_.

 

She guides his hand between her legs, lets him sink inside the place he imagines he will fit just right, because isn’t she accommodating by nature, adaptable even when he is poking holes in her sanity. Because she is right. Where can she go if she is as crazy as he is? He is one of the last that knows what she was like before.

 

He’s not going anywhere. He doesn’t tell her she isn’t either. Figures it is enough that he knows.

 

* * *

 

 

She gets back just when the sky starts turning dark grey and recalls the hot springs owner telling her it felt like monsoon weather, roaming thunderstorms prefaced by sticky humidity and static in the air. The cougar is gone when she gets back, and for a moment she is relieved to have some more time alone. Just a moment as she clips up the steps into the RV, tosses her bag onto the kitchenette counter and opens the mini fridge for a soda. She doesn’t hear him, but it doesn’t matter. Exasperation on the exhale when she turns around popping the tab on the can.

 

He is sprawled on the armchair reading a paperback he pinched from the Burns public library, western pulp fiction from the looks of the cover art. She wonders what the appeal is, each story the same song different verse, but he still reads them when they come here, lifts new ones from the library on the regular. She watches the covers change but never really, same square-jawed rough riders on the draw and wasp-waisted damsels in distress, half-dressed, tied up.

 

She sucks up the fizz around the lip of the soda can, watches him turn the page. “Where’s Seth?”

 

 “Beats me.” He flips another page, egghead speed reader. Without looking up, he asks her where she went.

 

“Hot Springs.” She wants to ask him if it was wise letting his brother go off in his condition but predicts his response. ‘He’s a grown-ass man can make his own decisions.’ Something to that effect.

 

He quirks a brow but keeps his focus on the paperback. “How?”

 

“Walked.”

 

That gets him to put the book down. “That’s almost five miles one way.”

 

“Yeah, well, alone time is important.” She can’t help her tone ending on a needle point.

 

“Starting to get cabin fever?”

 

She gives the narrow space a onceover, case in point. She leaves the soda on the counter and retreats to take a shower.

 

Her shoulders and cheeks are shiny pink, tender to touch. She presses her fingers to the skin, watches it pale and then flush. She is perturbed by herself, but there isn’t much difference, really. Her flesh still comes back together, seals itself shut just leaves no mark. The hot springs and monsoon humidity made her hair curl. She pulls at one ringlet, watches it bounce back into shape, contemplates straightening it just to keep her mood stable.

 

The accordion door rattles, crumples to the side.

 

“What?” So much for a moment of privacy.

 

“Get out of my head.”

 

He seems so serious about it that she has to force herself not to laugh. “You’re one to talk. Isn’t that what you’ve been doing? Getting inside the only way you know how?” She can read between the lines, too, with how many excuses he has given to feed off her.

 

“I could get inside you lots of ways.” He takes her hands in his, swallows her wrists up in the circumference of his fingers.

 

“I’m not her,” she whispers. Because she has just started to figure it out.

 

He rubs his thumbs across the soft undersides of her wrists. “Of course not.”

 

His hands frame her hips, lift her up to sit on the bathroom counter, and it is awkward not to dump into the sink, so she grips his belt to keep her forward. Something clicks in her head. She doesn’t hear him say it, but she feels it, knows it. _You’re Kate_.

 

She starts to slip the belt tip through the buckle when he kneels, has to catch herself from slipping into the sink by gripping the counter edge. He already has the front button of her jean shorts undone, zipper down, shimmying them down with her bikini bottoms, and when she looks down, it resembles supplication, irritates her. She tries to stop him. “What are you doing?”

 

He decides to call it ‘taking responsibility.’ Responsibility for how thoroughly he fucks up her life, because isn’t it still present tense. Has he finished yet?

 

“You’re always going down on me like you have something to prove.” She hopes it will annoy him enough to stop, but he just smirks like a ripe confident shit. “Do you want me to compare notes?” That gets him thinking, considering. In all honesty, it is apples to oranges, but he doesn’t need to know that. “I forget sometimes how bad you are at sharing, but you know, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s sharing me with him or the other way around.”

 

He’s quiet for a moment that she worries she might have pushed too far, not her intention, but then he returns with something that flips her stomach, chastises her, makes her laugh a little anyway. “What makes you think you’re the first one we’ve taken turns with?”

 

“You and your brother better not have a running bet to see who gets there first.”

 

He smiles, little boy mean. “That would be despicable.”

 

“Come here.” She pulls at his shirt, but he never, ever does what she wants. And his mouth is forcing her to reconsider things. The back of her head hitting the mirror gets her thoughts working again. He is softening her up, one, two, three, and she keeps pushing him to do more. No more chicken.

 

She finally pushes him back, slides down off the bathroom counter, bottomless and bikini top askew and her pulse living in the pit of her belly. As she untangles herself out of her top, he finally gets up off his knees.

 

It is an adventure to the bed, with a detour against the wall. She is balanced on his thigh, his hand clasped on her ass and rocking her hips forward. Her fingers struggle with the buttons on his shirt, distracted by the friction between her legs. The top button is the hardest to unbutton. She remembers from helping Scott get dressed for church, that men’s shirts button from the other side, and it comes back to her now trying to slip the stubborn little thing from its slit while Richie is working her over. Her hands give up, one slides down to cup him through his pants, and then her back is against the wall. She is off the ground, crushed against the plywood siding of the RV, and Richie just about ready to unintentionally break skin under her jawline.

 

“Bed, Richie, the bed,” she urges.

 

He backs up with her balanced on his hips. Three careful steps before he lays her out on the bed. It feels different to her now, like the sudden lurch from zero to sixty, because it isn’t the back of the cougar, he isn’t on his knees, she isn’t on hers. Her resolve melts briefly when he covers her body with his. She feels the weight of him, his hands covering so much of her, she feels swept up in something that was her decision. Until he upends the whole play, her world flipping. He sets her on top, her knees flanking his sides, his erection obvious against her bottom, because it was her decision. She wonders if he is playing chicken again, but he smooths one hand along her hip, the other up her navel. As he sits up, one grazes up to palm her breast and the other grips the back of her neck, guides her down so he can kiss her. He tastes like apples and Red Apples, and she accidentally clips his tongue with her teeth when he tweaks her nipple, apologizes by moving to the other. She inhales, presses closer.

 

He’s working down her jawline when she orders him to lose the shirt. “You’ve got two hands,” he tells her. His are busy. He stops progress just long enough she gets the buttons undone, watches her work at them with a focus that doesn’t suit her nudity, shelves his amusement without comment. He shrugs out of the bible-thumper shirt, lets her peel the wife-beater up off his torso, and studies the relief that comes, feels it in her hands as they move over his shoulders, down his abdomen, her fingertips tracing his treasure trail towards the last obstacle. Again she slips the belt tip from the buckle and he lets her, finally lets her do what she wants, lets her get under the second skin.

 

He thought maybe she already had. His brother bleeding through bandages and sleeping again, maybe she’d worn him out, because his brother never half-assed the other sex. Had she already given it up? He affords himself a little sick victory when her hands hesitate on the hem of his jockeys, studies the apprehension on her face, his gaze slipping down to the small cross cradled in the notch between her collarbones. Does she want to reach for it now? Will she reach for something else?

 

He tells her sorry right before, and she slips her hand over his monster mouth, feeds him the same pardon she gave Seth, because she knows he doesn’t mean it for what is about to happen. “I don’t give penalties for thoughts.” Because she’d be damned, too.

 

Damned regardless, she thinks as she slips down around him, watches his eyes roll back in his head, feels the warm humidity of his mouth against her palm. Her hand slides down across his throat, feels his Adam’s apple shift when he swallows. She needs to focus on each nuance of his reaction instead of the tearing feeling that hits after the initial fall, persists as she settles around him. She needs to focus on these small incidences, the building pressure of his fingers curled into her hips tensed, the mirrored stillness of his, focus on the possibility it means something.

 

She isn’t just some shared object between the two of them. She isn’t just a compromise, some distraction to keep the peace. She has stakes in what happens to the three of them. They have played cat and mouse long enough. What did Seth call it – pussyfooting her way towards the inevitable.

 

“Don’t take it lightly,” she nearly begs, hates herself for it, for caving. There is real loss, but he is still looking at her. He won’t close his eyes, and the brothers have that in common. They never blink first.

 

She wishes she could still see inside his head. It isn’t as clear as it was when she had Amaru, like an amplifier, like comparing the reach between a pocket radio and a broadcast tower. It reminds her of the chirps that bats make, a frequency beyond her capacity to understand even if she can physically hear it, but sometimes, if she is up close, if she really listens, focuses, she’ll catch something coherent.

 

 _Keep breathing, Katie-Cakes._ Her breathing skips on that, a small hiccup.

 

His palm cradles her sacrum, guides her forward just a little and the movement makes her gut seize. He noses beneath her jawline, just behind her ear, and she smells alkaline and salty, like the desert, hot springs, her hair still damp and curling. It is her. It is fair. They’ve antagonized one another enough. He did terrible things to her and she repaid in kind. They have to be even at this point. “Again,” he starts. A part of him thinks he got off easy, though, because now he is inside. It feels wonderfully awful what he is going to do to her. Finishes, “Despicable.”

 

He presses his thumb just above where they are joined, and she catches his wrist with both hands. “I can’t,” she whispers.

 

“We’ll get there,” he promises. She buries her face in his shoulder when he moves his thumb, shifts his hips up slowly, a shallow stroke, and the rough contrast frustrates her, like it is a taste of what it could be like, what it will be like even if she can’t get there this time. She tenses up again and he groans, his free hand gripping her waist tight.

 

She braces her hands on his shoulders, exhales and sits back, feels him slide deeper, press up against a part that makes her ache in the pit of her belly, and it doesn’t feel so bad. There is something needy about the next rise and fall, the way the fall ends in a pause, a press closer, to nudge that feeling of going too far, the edge of breaking, bursting. When she does it again, he holds her hips there, feels her nails dig into his shoulders as she squirms, presses closer anyway. He can see it on her face, the confusion, the curiosity, the apprehension when he lets her up and the need when she sinks down again, tests her limits, feels the tension inside her, and he wants to say he has no problem fucking her deep if that’s what she wants, resists the urge to flip her onto the bed and do just that.

 

They will get there eventually, he figures, shelves this newfound knowledge away for another day.

 

She kisses him like she is grateful, like she heard him, and he smiles small, wants to scold her for getting inside his head again, but he is starting to realize he sets himself up for it. He thought he was corrupting her. He feels corrupted.

 

She lets him all the way in, sighs against his cheek. “What is that?” And he tells her that is his dick against her cervix, his hands canting her hips just so to prove his point.

 

“Too clinical,” she chastises weakly, mms when he busies his mouth against her breast. His teeth graze her nipple, bite to make her whine, and she doesn’t disappoint. He leaves a mark on the underside of her breast before moving to the other, shivers when her nails rake over his scalp. Adapting each time he changes the game, she gets so tight to be nearly disorienting, makes him test and tease and prod to the point he can’t think.

 

His hand grabs her ass, guides her forward, lets her rock back, sets the pace quicker, and she keens a little, shifts away just a bit like it is too much, too deep. His name falls out stilted, a bitten off whimper, and still so much fucking kindness, tenderness, that it chafes him.

 

He comes, and her palms bracketing his face so she can watch, her shameless curiosity, it tugs him over the edge. He holds her tight against him, his dick buried inside her, her marked up breasts flush to his chest. Corrupted, he thinks, he is corrupted.

 

“Do you see better?” She wonders, pressing her index to the bridge of his glasses. He reaches up and takes them off, flips them over and slides them up the bridge of her nose. They immediately slide back down, too big for her face. But, she realizes they are just for show, and somehow her chest gets tight with that knowledge.

 

She rises just enough to feel him slip out before sitting back, empty and throbbing. His fingers skim through her folds, slick in the mess of her, of him, and he dips his head over her shoulder, catches a streak of red, the last of her virgin blood. She paints shapes in the sweat along his shoulder blades, doesn’t say anything when he slips his fingers in his mouth, wonders what thoughts, what memories were left behind. He tilts his face into the side of her neck and she feels teeth grazing, nursing her pulse. He wants the last of it. He wants all of it.

 

“Go ahead,” she whispers. A small sigh when he sinks fangs, but she distracts herself by tracing the scales across his forehead, down the back of his neck. She wonders if he gets to the most important parts.

 

She hears his fangs retract, but he keeps his mouth to the puncture wounds a moment longer, languishing. Is it all gone? Then he presses his lips to her cross, brief, and she feels her heart hitch.

 

“Strawberry shortcake.”

 

She covers his mouth, feels her face flush. “You’re awful.”

 

He looks sleepy, heavy-eyed, but he murmurs against her fingers, “You like it when I’m awful.” He pushes his glasses up on her face, smiles when they slide right back down. She wonders if there are any secrets left between them?

 

“Are you going to sleep now?” Finally, she thinks. She wants to make a joke about male rabbits but knows he hasn’t slept in days. He is pulling them both down to the mattress, mumbling about getting her a band-aid first but he is drifting off. She only watches, bleeds and watches, eventually leaves him on the bed to patch herself up.

 

* * *

 

 

The trailer door opens, the roar of the rain louder, and Seth clipping up the steps. “Hey Richie, is Kate back?” Because he is wondering if she got caught in the rain, if he should go pick her up. She hears him through the bathroom door, the screen slamming behind him. He must see Richie passed out on the bed, figures let his brother sleep, and then he is reaching for the accordion door.

 

She stands up straight when he pulls the door to the side, doesn’t bother to cover herself when Seth pauses in the doorway, hoping to take a piss, getting a centerfold instead. She stands there steamy and pink before a foggy mirror, and he sees all the places his brother tried to leave a mark.

 

He is soaked through, a puddle forming on the linoleum around his bootheels, and Kate offers him a towel. He looks at the towel, past the towel at her breasts, the smooth slope to the slight swell below her navel, grabs the towel before his eyes go lower.

 

“You look like a wet dog,” she tells him. She thinks he is going to be jealous. She anticipates it.

 

“Yeah.” He drapes the towel over his head, dries off while eyeing his brother sprawled on the mattress, the bridge of Richie’s slacks still broken. His brother the light sleeper, and he hasn’t so much as shifted. “Guess you really wore him out.”

 

She tugs an oversized shirt over her head, one of his undershirts, he thinks. “You got your bandages wet.” Her bare legs and the stretched collar, he feels the affection – the infection spreading. The band-aid peeking out from underneath the stretched collar, something like guilt tweaks his gut. He glances at Richie still asleep on the bed. And he knows it is different, what she has with him, what she has with his brother, two opposite poles of a magnet and he doesn't quite get how she works her way around that. 

 

She gets his attention by grabbing the lapels of his jacket and switching their positions, a slow about circle in the narrow space of the trailer, her naked toes clipped by his boots. “When you’re done, let me change them out.” He backs up into the bathroom, only closes the door when she turns away.

 

She is laying out fresh gauze and rolls of medical tape when he comes back out, the towel still draped over his head. He feels phantom stings just from looking at the antiseptic, but her hand on his shoulder guides him gently onto the couch. She helps him out of his suit jacket, the one with the hole, wants to tell him it is stupid to go out in the rain with an opening right over a bullet wound, but just puts it on a wooden hanger in one of the trailer closets, leaves the door open so it can dry.

 

“The sky opened up,” he tells her.

 

She runs her fingers down the sleeve of the suit jacket. “I believe it.” When she comes back over, she unsnaps the mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt, peels it off his shoulders. There is a pinprick of red fading into damp pink. She barters for his wife-beater, ignores the grimace when he raises his shoulders.

 

She unwraps the wet bandages, peels back the tape losing its stick, and then inspects the stitching, how the wound is healing. “You really need to take it easy.”

 

“Looks worse than it is,” he assures her, circling his shoulder for proof and swallowing a wince.

 

Kate lays her hand over the knob of his shoulder, slows his movements. “Please.” 

 

He doesn’t argue. He is trying to keep his eyes off her legs, because he doesn’t know if she put on underwear, and then his mind is reeling. He sits back, drops his hands in his lap while she runs gauze soaked in antiseptic around the stitching, kneeling on the couch next to him. He hisses when she gets too close to the parts still tender and open, and she pecks his cheekbone as an apology. Too nice, he thinks, too kind, almost guilty. “I’m not a kid.”

 

“I know.” She tapes a rectangle of gauze over the stitches. She doesn’t know why she suddenly feels so terrified, choking on it. She wants to tell him he is supposed to last. She wants to tell him she chose him then, back before, because he was supposed to last, even human he would make it out the other side of whatever fresh hell came up.

 

“You’re not dead,” she tells him, tucking the end of the bandage under the wrapping.

 

“I might as well be, because you’re treating me like I’m gonna break.”

 

“That’s how this story ends, doesn’t it?” It comes out and she regrets it. But she doesn’t hold it against him, being human, not like Richie. His humanity usually comforts her, and she always thought there was something about him that was oddly more than human, in his wily persistence, his dumb luck, his ability to take a beating standing, but these are the same things that might end him, that will end him, someday.

 

They hear the mattress springs creak, Richie stirring, and she peeks over her shoulder, watches him search across the bed for her, settle for a cigarette. Most of the stick of his pomade is gone, and his hair hangs lank over his forehead as he lights his cigarette. He exhales and spies the two of them at the front of the RV. “You look like a wet dog.”

 

Kate smiles, turns back to Seth and frames his head in her hands, rubs the towel over his damp hair, gets behind his ears. “Come on, Butch, let’s get you out of the rest of those wet clothes.”

 

“Guess I should congratulate you on finally sealing the deal,” Seth offers to his brother, who just snorts, smokes his cigarette.

 

Kate smacks Seth lightly on the side of the head. “Don’t be an ass.”


	7. unlucky skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unlucky Skin by Shakey Graves  
> Backseat Driver by Shakey Graves  
> Sing Swan Song by CAN  
> Well I Wonder by the Smiths  
> Nose on the Grindstone by Tyler Childers
> 
> The will to write is so much a function of the right song at the right time. 
> 
> Shit’s been crazy and I’ve been holed up in more than one desert for the last few months, state-hopping and never landing. This transiency thing was fun for a while but fingers crossed it comes to a cozy conclusion soon. Also, I revisited the Alvord playa for shits and grins and realized there were some minor inaccuracies in my recollection in earlier chapters. I may or may not be bothered to fix them. Still one of my favorite places on god’s good green earth.

Nothing made it out of the fire. Half the apartment building burned down, and it was easy for the neighbors, the police and the firefighters, the court to blame the drunk son of a bitch thief with his two trolls for sons that lived at the end of the hall in 307. He sat in the gallery next to his brother while the free lawyer representing their dead dad bent over and let the prosecution, the judge, and the jury take what was left, partition it out to the survivors, their neighbors, like crows around charred carrion.

 

In a week their social worker burned through the list of potential guardians, every obscure family member and estranged third cousin that came up on her radar, kin Seth had never heard of before tucked away in the bowels of the mother bayou. But these people knew Ray and even the seediest Geckos wouldn’t touch the two.

 

All of it lost at the end of a lit cigarette, he thought.

 

Two weeks at the group home they got a call from Uncle Eddie in the state penitentiary outside Huntsville. He wasn’t on the original list of relatives, but word of his former partner’s smoky end eventually made its way through the prison system. In the bare hallway leading to the courtyard, Seth and Richie shared the receiver shoulder to shoulder listening to Eddie tell them the plan in painstaking detail, because he was a ‘meticulous man and you two dumbasses will need some direction.’ Seth scuffed at the greasy linoleum with the toe of his sneaker while Richie skinned an apple with a small flip knife he hid in his shoe, and the two of them mad-dogged another kid as he passed, the one who liked to give the other boys smileys at the end of a Bic lighter. And the kid toyed with the Bic in his pocket while Seth and Richie listened to Eddie tell them to keep their noses down.

 

Seth would wax all day about his brother’s piss-poor people skills, that the kid had no tact. “Read the room, Richie.” But then Seth would turn around and get his nut cracked for ball busting the wrong mug. Honest they both picked up too many bad habits from the old man without meaning to, Richie too blunt, Seth too hot-headed, and both unable to manage connecting their mouth to their sense half the time.

 

A year later Seth was back in the courtroom for assaulting his foster brother, listening to another fresh-faced free lawyer paying his dues explaining to the judge that Seth’s trauma from losing his father so young, the time spent in a dysfunctional group home, these things had warped his sense of right and wrong. Seth just wondered if fingering his foster sister could be excused by his ‘unfortunate circumstances.’ Lucky for him that fun tidbit didn’t make it onto the court transcript, but it didn’t stop her giving him fuck eyes from the gallery throughout the trial.

 

When he got back to the group home, Richie pinned him to the wall next to the payphone, and even while his brother shook and stuttered and held him, it was the first time Seth noticed Richie was getting taller, that it seemed he grew seven inches in the space of seven months. Seth held his brother, patted the back of his damp sweaty head through Richie’s panic attack, and could only think about Richie catching up to him, ruing the fucking day like a selfish prick.

 

Later that night, Seth stared at the bottom of the top bunk where his brother slept and thought it was funny. It wasn’t beating the shit out of his foster brother or playing doctor with his foster sister or pissing on his foster mother’s posies. It wasn’t keying the free lawyer’s car or clogging the toilets in the courthouse. None of these things brought him shame. He didn’t regret any of it. All it took was a single bad thought towards his pathetic, awkward, violent and gawky four-eyed brother and then he was a repentant mess.

 

He can make excuses he was passing up good deals to save his brother, but Seth fucked himself for Seth more often than he fucked himself for the sake of his psychopath of a brother.

 

He remembers something Kate might have asked him once when he was soused and strung out on H. “What are you trying to get away from?” And he couldn’t answer her, couldn’t give her a straight answer anyway without the possibility of some other strange word floating into the mix, too high to get the words right, but the truth was clear and solid in his head. She didn’t get it. Had he ever apologized for being a ripe shit and a criminal through and through, because that is what it looked like, like he was shooting guilt, chasing it with shame at the bottom of a bottle.

 

He would say he mauled his foster brother just so he wouldn’t have to abandon his real one. And Richie believed it. Richie was grateful for it. And Seth would say he did it because he owed Richie for pulling him from the fire or because he didn’t think Richie could make it without him.

 

“You can’t make it without him either,” Kate murmured once in spite when he said something cruel about his dumbass brother, driving drunk until he pulled onto the shoulder to throw up on a discarded mattress. She crawled over the gear shift while he emptied his guts on the side of some Mexican highway, waited patiently picking at the frayed faux leather wrapped around the gear shift until he slid into the passenger seat.

 

_He’s my brother,_ like a magic charm, like it explained it all away, justified his right and wrong, nullified his bad.

 

He asked her once about the day they met, more the day she met his brother.

 

His brother talking like everything was preordained and Seth couldn’t close his eyes on the mutilated bank teller sprawled on the motel bed. He used to do it to inanimate objects – the television set, their father’s watches, the fucking toaster, but it wasn’t the first time his brother had flayed something living just to see what was going on inside, just to know what made it tick. He had a feeling Richard didn’t open this woman up to understand what made her work. Her pretty doe eyes nestled in her palms, and Seth had to swallow back acid in this throat.

 

She said he scared her, and that made sense. His brother was scaring the shit out of him, too, and that was a tall order for Seth. He knew his brother had a few screws loose, some quirks most others couldn’t stomach, but Seth never imagined his own guts would curl at the sight of his brother, at the sight of what his brother was capable of, what he could do without blinking an eye. Geckos don’t blink.

 

“What do you want to know?” Kate asked back through a yawn, sounding kind of bored with it, with him, five hours on the road and the clock inching towards the zero hour.

 

“What did he say to you?” Seth asked, itching the needle scabs under his ear.

 

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about him,” she reasoned, throwing her bare feet up on the dash, and even then he was starting to eye her the wrong way, young and kind and naïve, not his type at all.

 

He checked the rearview for the seventh time in the last ten miles and told her he was breaking his rule. “You and your rules,” she sighed. Ticking them off on her fingers, tired but not enough to cut the sass. “Stick to the plan. Keep the score on your person. Keep your nose down. Don’t talk about Richard.”

 

“Just be a dear,” he tried to joke, chewing the inside of his cheek.

 

She stared at him for a few moments from across the front seat of the shit-box Pontiac, studied the manic shine in his eyes, and he swilled from the burnt truck-stop coffee in the sticky cupholder, thought she looked like a kid that didn’t know staring was rude.

 

“He said he saw me bleeding in the pool, that I must be hurting, avoiding my father, things that wouldn’t exactly be obvious to a stranger.”

 

“So, what scared you?” He asked her once. She told him the bare bones version. And he never pushed her to elaborate. After covering the bank teller with the motel sheet, he wasn’t sure he would like any of the answers. But there in the car with her months after the fact he didn’t think any of it mattered anymore, not knowing, that the answer wouldn’t change anything.

 

“He said I thought my father killed my mother.”

 

“Did he?”

 

“No,” she says firmly. “My mother killed my mother. And she nearly took my father with her.” She is quiet for a beat then nearly whispers the next part. “You know, sometimes I think it might’ve been better if she had.” She doesn’t elaborate on it though, but he can guess the next part. She lost her father anyway. Maybe she would have been better off if both her parents died in that car accident. She wouldn’t have ended up in that Pontiac with nothing and no one except a junkie thief.

 

“You should’ve seen something was dragging him in, someone was manipulating him,” she speculated on her own, connecting dots that he didn’t until after the fact, because now he thinks the same thing. He should have seen it. He should have done something, should have known something wasn’t right. And Richard was telling him, admitting something might be wrong with him, but he was alternating between states, manic and unbalanced one minute and then sure that everything was kosher that Seth didn’t know what to think. But not knowing what to think should have been the tip off.

 

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. He doesn’t think about what-ifs so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his bad decisions.

 

He was glad she wasn’t his type then. She was what he needed, someone kind, someone forgiving, someone who would tell him what he needed to hear even if it pissed him off, someone who would purposefully, mercifully forget the next morning after he drunkenly pawed at her. He wonders if she kissed him on that motel bed in the middle of a Mexican desert because she wanted to know what was different, if it was different, if it was better or worse than when she kissed his brother.

 

He thought she was easy to manipulate, but he missed it then, in the Winnebago and the Twister. If he had been paying attention instead of getting his panties bunched over Carlos, he would have heard more, noticed more, would have seen Richard take her hand in his and submit to prayer or how she sat close to his brother first, kissed him first in the backroom of the Twister. His brother, the master manipulator, emotionally stunted and socially inept, subdued by a bible-thumping preacher’s daughter.

 

Does she soften his brother? She softened him, and when they were carrying out their drugstore cowboy routine throughout Mexico, sometimes he couldn’t stand it, how vulnerable she was, how inexperienced, but Richard would say he liked having someone to boss around, someone to keep under his thumb. And now no, she isn’t under his thumb. She isn’t under anyone’s. He feels pinned.

 

He worried a little after Matanzas. He didn’t know everything. He couldn’t guess at what she had done while the hell bitch was inside her, so he tiptoed for a bit, because he couldn’t be sure about the girl who made it out the other side. She continued to laugh with him, though, eventually, snark and snipe, let him continue teaching her proper gun maintenance and reading body language and learning code words. But she kept her good book, earmarked and annotated. Sometimes he hears her pray at night, and she did when he burned the black leather, prayed and watched her wolf skin burn in the empty oil barrel. She took back her jeans and modest shirts, sundresses and cardigans, reclaimed her sheep’s clothing. He settled into it after a while, something like their old routines minus the bitter benders. She seemed to settle, too.

 

He bought her her first gun, the S&W .38 special. And his brother scoffed, because Seth was married to the revolver, argued they were easier to clean, easier to reload, didn’t have to mess with a clip. But Richie didn’t like the double-action and the restricted clip capacity. He thought she should start with something simpler, single-action, safety built into the trigger, like a small Glock, not too much to mess with. Seth got her the S&W snubby anyway. Glocks jammed too often.

 

Too impressionable by half with several creatures at once warring inside her, and he doesn’t know how she deals. Two parts preacher’s daughter, a dash of Gecko, and the remnants of the devil floating somewhere in that stew. Does he know her at all?

 

He asked her when she started up with Richie, and all she could say was some things feel pretty inevitable. _Richie was just one of those things_. For him, too, Richie had always been just one of those things he couldn’t get away from, didn’t really want to get away from.

 

They were both pretty good at it, playing footsie under his nose. But, he shouldn’t be surprised. The uncanny connections between the two of them, the pushes and pulls, that all started long before the church in Matanzas. Santanico derailed it but it was only postponed, because maybe Kate was right – some things are just inevitable.

 

When he did find out, it was a while. He sort of knew before that night in Barstow, but he could write it off as harmless flirting. Even he made half-assed overtures towards her, joking flirtations, things that used to make her blush when they were running through Mexico. She never flirted back then, but in the months following Matanzas she started biting back, testing the waters. Was it always her plan to pin them both down? Was she that devious? He looks at her and can’t think so.

 

It feels like they sleep forever. The deluge outside the trailer enough of a deterrent, keeps them from leaving, from caring. Days and Seth vacillates between modes of consciousness, opens his eyes just enough to see her nearly tipping over the side of the mattress, half-dreaming when his brother, eyes closed, reaches blindly across the bed to cuff her upper arm, pulls her back on board. He hears Richie say something about how she moves too much in her sleep before all of them slip back under.

 

He is standing next to an upturned chair. The man is sitting in the only chair right side up at the only table not smashed or shot-through. The dust is still settling around them, and Seth feels the low light on his back, studies how it passes through the rattlesnake coiled in the bottle like a daisy chain, the amber glow of the whiskey. There are two shot glasses next to the bottle, a third one shattered across the tabletop.

 

They are both wearing black leather gloves. The man removes his carefully, tugs at each finger before slipping them off his hands, folds them neatly and tucks them into the inner chest pocket of his gauche leather duster. The mandarin collar undone for once, and then Seth sees the white clerical tab stark against his black button up. Seth swallows when he sees his right hand, scarred up and larger than the other, tiny fissures working their way like veins and they glow like the light through the whiskey, like his flesh and blood are molten beneath the rough crust of his skin.

 

“That’s your seat,” the man tells him, catching his attention, gesturing at the upturned chair at Seth’s feet.

 

Seth obediently picks up the chair, both hands useful, no pain in his shoulder, no more hole failing to close. He takes a seat as the man pops the cork on the whiskey bottle, pours them both a generous jigger.

 

“Cheers,” the man says, sliding the shot across the table. He lifts his glass towards Seth, waits for Seth to toast.

 

Seth curls his fingers around the shot, the glass hot to the touch, as if straight off the coals of the man’s hand. “What are we toasting?”

 

The man reaches across the table and clinks his glass with Seth’s, quickly sends it down the hatch. He smacks his lips after. Seth thinks he imagines steam coming from his mouth. “To your becoming, my friend.”

 

Seth runs his tongue along the back of his teeth, tastes grit and GSR. He decides to go along with it. “To my becoming.” He shoots the whiskey, like swallowing fire. Sends the shot glass back across the table upside down, leaves behind a streak of whiskey on the dusty wood.

 

The man’s right hand reaches across the table for Seth’s. Seth scratches at his neck, regards the man’s smoldering hand, feels his own fingertips catch the uneven marks under his jawline, feels them itch and burn. “I killed you.”

 

The man’s hand doesn’t move, remains outstretched waiting for Seth’s. “In theory. In practice, who is to know? With everything you’ve seen, how could you ever really be sure?”

 

“You were just a pile of flesh.”

 

“You are just a pile of flesh,” the man counters, smile enigmatic behind his sunglasses, and Seth sees his own dim reflection in the lenses, distorted and stretched in all the wrong places, the whiskey twisting in his gut like a snake roiling, pressing against the walls, frying in the acid of his stomach and frothing angry.

 

The man lashes out and catches Seth’s right hand, pulls him nearly across the table. “All your misdeeds, your transgressions, all your wrongs.” His fingers tighten around Seth’s, yank him closer, and Seth feels heat in his bones. “All preparation, my friend.” Seth tries to pull away, knocks the whiskey bottle over. It shatters on the ground. He feels the snake crawling over his boots, slithering between his ankles. “To be her right hand, to be Judgment,” the man goes on, and he sounds so pleased, so proud to pass this on. His palm is blistering inside the man’s hand, skin bubbling up and crisping away. “It’s a gift, brother.” He is on fire, flames crawling up his throat, smells burnt hair before he smells nothing, senses nothing but watches the world blaze away.

 

His right arm is tucked tight against his chest, the sling straps cinched down, but he doesn’t remember putting it back on. For a moment, still partly out of it, he thinks sleep paralysis or worse his arm is dead, gone. The mattress shifts, and he hears her little groan, the low undertones of his brother whispering close. Seth’s left arm squirms out across the bed, tangles in the sheets where she was just warm and he feels an opposing tension, a pull, the sound of a heel sliding along cotton, a weak and irritated ‘hey’.

 

The ache is deep down in there, like he can feel the bones grinding the wrong way. He flexes his fingers, a slight shift of his arm, and the ache flares like a blade through humerus and scapula. Fever heat above his eyes when he opens them to see Richie’s big palm splayed along the base of her spine, his fingers disappeared in the back of her sleep shorts, that soft pink cotton with bleach stains. Seth wonders if they fucked at some point while he was blitzed on pain pills, fucked with him right there on the mattress. How would he know? His brother isn’t above it. She isn’t the first girl they’ve shared, because how the fuck else was his brother going to lose his virginity.

 

He starts to slide off the mattress, jonesing for a smoke to take the edge off his nightmare, the frustration in the pit of his stomach, the guilt melting around it. She keeps him there with a fistful of his shirt in her little hand, tugs him backwards. He lets her lay him back down, her palm on his bum shoulder keeping him flat. Richie watching him kiss a teenage girl, watching him like he is waiting for Seth to sink down to his level. And then his brother is there, up against her back.

 

His shoulder is killing him; her mouth tastes stale but she makes a little animal noise, like some small creature, something cute, frustrates him. And then a sharp inhale, her teeth accidentally catch his lip, and he spies her hand shooting back behind her, pushing at Richie’s. “Richie, don’t.” His brother keeps going, and she pushes at him again, starts to turn away from Seth to chastise him properly.

 

Seth puts two and two together. “Richard, have some fucking respect,” he says, scolding his brother over her shoulder.

 

Tactless smartass, he gives lip, sounds worse than his actions. “I figured Sister Christian would be familiar with God’s loophole.”

 

His arm is killing him. Kate smothers his brother with a pillow. He mumbles he is going for a smoke, disentangles himself from the fray. His brother twists his head to the side, grabs her wrists. Seth hears him from behind. “Prude.” Before he gets another mouthful of cotton.

 

It’s dangerous what she is gonna get them to do to her, eventually. It is horrible what they have already done. He glances back at Richie play wrestling, letting her win, and her, letting him. How the hell does he fit? Why does she let his brother do those things to her? Does she enjoy it? Does he know her at all? He thinks this while he strikes a match, kicks open the trailer door.

 

The rain is nothing but a mist now, a feckless drizzle. The ember sizzles a little when the misting rain hits but it keeps its light.  He stares out across the salted grasses, all the cracks in the clay sewn up, and he feels thirsty looking at the ground. Three steps down and the tips of his boots are dipped in mud. His gaze skirts to the left, catches the front passenger tire sunk to the middle of the hubcap. Eyes right and the rear is even deeper. He takes a drag, scratches the stubble under his cheekbones. “Fuck.”

 

* * *

 

 

Submersed to ankle bones, she draws shapes in the mud while the brothers contemplate the Winnie, sharing the last Red Apple. Winding serpents and cat’s eyes while Seth blames Richie for parking too far in on the playa and Richie blames Seth for something. She starts tuning them out, because it isn’t bad yet. They are still sharing the cigarette. Seth argues he at least had the forethought to park the cougar closer to the road. Richie puts the cigarette out in the mud, half-finished, out of spite. Seth plants his muddy boot heel on his brother’s shoulder and shoves him over, knocks her sprawling, too.

 

His entire left side from pant leg to shoulder dipped in mud. She tugs Richie by his shirttails when he makes a move towards his brother, meaning to take him down, too, and he loses his balance again and stripes mud up his other side. Mud up her sleep shorts now, caked in the crack of her ass. He grabs her when she starts to stand, and she sprawls, mud in her belly button, smeared up her cheeks.

 

Seth hisses as his free hand slips up over his bum shoulder. He drops his hand, starts towards the cougar parked near the road, leaves the two of them wrestling in the mud. “Don’t be a fucking wet!” Richie chimes behind him, plastering her crown with clay. Fever sweat and the mist are mixing on his brow, but he flips his brother off without turning around.

 

There is a shovel in the trunk of the cougar, something he uses to bury the score, something his brother uses to bury the leftovers. He can dig the cougar out when the clay hardens a little. The Winnebago might as well be a lost cause. What do they need it for anymore? He checks to make sure the shovel is still in the boot, catches Kate straddling his brother, shoving mud in his face, wonders if Richie ever let anyone else make him messy. Maybe tomorrow he can free the cougar.

 

He glances across the playa and sees Kate sliding barefoot across the mud. From this distance, it looks like she is skating across the top of the lake. Richie strips off his ruined shirt and body surfs behind her. She asks if she can ride him across the playa, and then they are competing to see who can slide the furthest in one go.

 

No, no one ever got to make Richie messy. He gave it to Seth. He gives it over to her now.

 

* * *

 

 

He holds the hose above her head while she strips to her skivvies and lets him get in all the cracks and crevices. Only once he presses his thumb over the nozzle and sprays her in the face. She plants two wet handprints on his stomach in retaliation, squeals and sputters. “You’re both being so mean,” she says after, eyelashes clumped with wet and her chin dripping.

 

“Tough love,” he figures, wiping away a smudge of mud under her ear.

 

“Don’t I get a hose down?” Richie wonders off to the side, and his brother nods, yeah it is only fair, cranks the spigot handle, folds his thumb over the nozzle, shoots his brother down. “Now who’s a fucking wet.”

 

* * *

 

 

The rain stops mid-morning, and Seth orders Richie to dig out the cougar. Richie argues the clouds are breaking up; he can feel the sun closer. “Guess you better get to it then.”

 

His brother is smoking by the time he staggers hurriedly into the trailer, snaps the blinds closed and stumbles into the bathroom to douse his head under water. Kate licks her finger and turns the page on one of Richie’s seedy westerns, taps her toes against Seth’s thigh while he cleans his Ruger.

 

“You getting that itch again,” she wonders, underlines a passage with a ballpoint pen that leaks, leaves smudges of ink on her palms.

 

His sling is draped on the arm of the sofa. “To move on?” He stares down the barrel, runs the solvent-soaked cloth through once more and it comes back clean.

 

“You’re thinking things have been too quiet.” She slides the heel of her foot from hip to knee. Her soles are starting to crack from going barefoot too often.

 

“You know what I’m thinking now, princess?”

 

“I was wondering when you were gonna get that itch again.”

 

“Don’t worry about my itching, sweetheart.”

 

“Yeah, I’ve tried to learn that. You won’t tell me ‘til it happens right? You’ll wake up one day with some new grand plan. You’re good at that.”

 

“Good at it?”

 

“Finding new and ambitious ways to get yourself killed. You want to be king. Your brother wants to be God. I think both – you need to get cozy with death.” 

 

“Says the chick who’s died how many times now.”

 

“And I was queen.”

 

She peeks into the plastic bags on the kitchen counter behind her, cardboard tubes painted with technicolor starbursts and radioactive warning signs, packets of twelve inch sparklers and glossy rounds of cherry bombs. “Is it already the fourth of July?” Nowhere close.

 

He glances at the bags. “Your birthday was a few days ago.” Continues reassembling the revolver. “Didn’t know you’d already gotten your dose of fireworks,” he figures, and she shoves his thigh with her heel.

 

She asked him once when his birthday was and he just said a year and one day from Richie’s, never whether before or after. After a few minutes, he asked her the same, but she bet he wouldn’t remember it. “Welcome to adulthood, princess.”

 

* * *

 

 

Richie cups his hands around the fuse while Seth strikes the flint over and over, curses the windy shithole they’ve been shacked up on for the past two weeks. A crackling of sparks and Richie’s palms fall away while Seth aims the bottle rocket towards the sky. Kate flinches at the loud pop and squealing fire, watches the light dancing in Seth’s smiling eyes.

 

Richie lights her sparkler, and she sits back on her haunches, haunts a camel spider with sparks spitting across the drying clay, and the creature has nowhere to hide, no cracks to fall into.

 

Richie tosses a lit cherry bomb above their heads, and they scatter across the playa, her sparkler left sizzling against the damp ground. The cherry bomb detonates midair, misses all three, and Seth repays the favor by throwing firecrackers at his brother’s feet.

 

Kate crushes the sparkler under her boot heel, watches the dying twilight over the Steens, the Big Dipper brightening just above the snowy edge of the mountain. There is music from the open windows of the cougar, the station host rough introducing the next song set over the bad reception, old country and church songs. It is their last night on the playa.

 

Seth asks if she ever lit a Roman candle before and no. Scott was always into the big loud bangers and screechers, reenacting old WWII battles with sky rockets and M-80s, tossing a box of snaps into the air and running away to avoid a firebombing. She liked sparklers, safe, controlled, still pretty. But, Seth hands her the Roman candle, instructs her to aim well away, and he will light the fuse.

 

It isn’t a well-formed thought at first, but it doesn’t surprise her either once it happens, when she sends a searing pink comet through the passenger window of the Winnebago. The second round strikes the side panel between the window and the door, leaves a roasting scorch mark over the decal. The third knocks in the door, lights up the sofa.

 

There is a brief moment of disbelief as flames fill up the windows, lick at broken glass, smoke spilling from the last thing the Fullers owned, her middling inheritance, the last place she felt some type of normal even as her father was leading them into the blind. Normal because she had a father, she had a brother, and she never imagined anything could be worse than her mother dying.

 

Scott dropping the RV off with her a few months back when they were still in Texas, suggesting she might replace the mattress where Tanner made his sexual chattel out of hapless coeds, admitting the thing made him uncomfortable not just because the professor used it as his own personal den of iniquity. Her father still listed on the expired registration, his pastor card under the driver’s seat, his hat hanging in the closet. All of it burning now. All of it lost at the end of a Roman candle. A shadow of a home, she thinks, present at every moment her life went further to shit. Did her father ever guess he was buying the Fuller’s own private mobile labyrinth, that passing into the Chieftain meant signing a lose-lose contract with a puzzle the devil made? The brothers signed that contract, too.

 

Richie lights an M-80 and tosses it up onto the roof of the trailer. The plexiglass skylights crackle and pop. “Good fucking riddance.”

 

Seth reaches some private decision on his own watching the driver’s seat catch fire with Kate’s first shot. “Fuck it.” He rustles up another Roman candle and lights the sucker, aims for the rear windows. The first comet hits the rear tire, pops, burning rubber smell mixing with melting acrylic. The second shatters the window, sets fire to their bed.

 

The sheets she stole from a motel in Eureka, kings she made fit the queen, the cotton curling with pink and blue fire, eating up old cigarette burns and whatever other remnants of her innocence. The flames reach the tiny bathroom, consuming the water-stained drywall, melting away the cheap plastic shower where she was alone with the two of them for the first time, pinned between Seth sweating the bathroom door with his revolver cocked and Richie knocking his head on the shower head and Kate stuffing her ears in anticipation. She never knew how loud a bare gunshot was until Seth fired next to her head earlier that day. Her head was still ringing that afternoon.

 

Seth telling her everything was going to be okay if she did right, no bumps or scrapes. She thinks he meant it. He always meant it, but it was one of his best qualities, in her opinion, well-meaning but so painfully human and unlucky, kind but crawling with unlucky skin.

 

He sends the third comet soaring into the night sky, and it lands on the playa beneath the rising moon gold and full. Kate whisper wonders if he wants to give her another dose of fireworks, her hands curling around his still holding the smoking candle, and Seth glances at Richie standing a few feet ahead of them, hands in his pockets staring at the conflagration. Richie doesn’t turn around when Kate is guiding Seth towards the cougar. Seth drops the spent Roman candle spilling a few more sparks on the playa, and Richie turns his head, fire shine on his glasses, keeps his hands in his pockets.

 

It’s awkward in the backseat and her bare knees squeak on the leather when they start to sweat. “Is your arm okay?” Even so, she keeps unbuckling his belt, breaking the bridge of his jeans.

 

He doesn’t know a more tactful way of telling her not to worry, that when he got enough blood going to his dick she was on the top of his to-do list, kisses her instead. He can hear her little groan through the roar of the trailer fire and empty static on the lost radio station, her hiss when he slides his fingers under the elastic of her panties, feels damp cotton on his knuckles and her slick on his finger pads. He goes by feel, cannot see with the skirt of her sundress draped over his hand.

 

Slides home, meets a fraction of resistance that she briefly hitches on, finally ignores when she settles. “Hurts?”

 

She shakes her head no then nods a little. “Getting used to it.”

 

“You want me to move or?”

 

“No.” She keeps reminding herself to breathe. “You’re hurt.” Her fingers curled up in his western button up.

 

“I’m not gonna break,” he promises, his palm cradling the base of her spine, one holding weakly high on the thigh, helping her steady.

 

She laughs short, not meaning to laugh at him, but the laugh makes her ache down there. He is more breakable than she at this point.

 

The harsh pop of M80s lost in the blaze behind her, and she can see the fire glowing in the back of Seth’s dark eyes, burns like a star deep down in there, like the sun. She directs his right hand down between her thighs. “Right there,” she orders, and he presses down with his thumb, circles once when she lifts her hips and drops slowly back down.

 

His free hand tugs the smocked top of her yellow sundress and her small breasts bounce free when she plunges her hips forward again. She eases into a roll, and he runs his fingers through her soft auburn hair, grazing along the nape of her neck as he watches her, circles his thumb in time with her rolling hips. Cannot help himself when he catches one breast in his mouth, sinks his teeth lightly and braces one hand on her shoulders to keep her there, feels the thrum of satisfaction when she jerks her hips forward, cries out.

 

She is either too stupid to know better or too kind to leave them alone. He feels responsible for her, stupid guilty Catholic bullshit spoon fed too early. He kept himself from her as long as he could, reasoning she was worth more than a quick fuck, reasoning he was better than being baited by some teeny Sister Christian, lured in by a soft pink smile and the inherent compulsion to be the first to touch something untouched, everything about her unspoiled and feeling like a trap. Yeah, stupid weak man, he thinks, base creature, no better than his brother.

 

He wonders if she feels responsible for them. He wants her to feel responsible for him, because he wants her.

 

She buries her face in the side of his neck, stilted keening in his ear like she is in pain, aching and cramping but pushing forward to grasp that brief wave of goodness. Glass shatters and the fire coughs, flares, Richie whipping a half-empty bottle of liquor at the blazing RV, and her fingers dig into the base of his skull, scrape down and up as her hips buck, knees tight on either side of his thighs. He threads his fingers in her hair, holds her close, her teeth worrying at the juncture of his shoulder and neck, murmurs another latent apology and she whines, comes.

 

He doesn’t really think when he spills inside of her, because maybe now she really is just a living dead girl, twice dead, his brother too, him soon enough just maybe. Maybe they have all been dead a while, because with everything that’s happened, everything he has seen, could he ever really be sure? Living here on the fringes with the two of them feels like living where the world ends. He is always front row where the world ends. Crawling up out of one hole into another.

 

“You’re all I have now,” she whispers to him, smells the smoke and sees it swirling in the pits of his dark brown eyes, sees her chastity smoking in that charred steel carcass filled with the scattered smoldering bits of her father, the color cover of a seedy western peeling back, her father’s pastor ID the bookmark, his anemic blue eyes smiling, melting.

 

It scares him a little, always thinking he might not be enough, not made to be enough.

 

* * *

 

 

A salted sea of red at her feet. She stands on the brink of a red sea, warm water lapping at her ankles, gazing out across the playa with the burned out trailer behind her. She looks over her shoulder, stares into the blank space where the door used to be, the screen hanging off its hinges, scorch marks rising up around the opening and curling across the broken windows. Was this where it started, in that trailer? She wonders sometimes if the brothers ever really made it out, if everything that happened to them – all just something dreamed up by a puzzle the gods made. She wonders if somewhere along the way in those tunnels they all got sucked in, too. Her father, her brother, every poor soul that crossed the threshold into the Twister, nothing but fodder for the labyrinth, food for the gods. Or if it started in that trailer before.

 

And then the end of the tunnel, dragging chains to the rubble where the pools of water get deeper. In her rearview she sees the bleachers lit up, lights like a home game and boots pounding the wood seats, chains scraping along the platform, blood soaking readily into the concrete, into the earth. She feels the wash of it down her collar, seeping along the valley between her breasts. Pools of black water, maybe black, because blood looks black in the dim.

 

The abyss that stares back and Richie whispering the natives believed these were gateways to the underworld. Black water bubbling like hot springs, blood boiling at her feet, and she catches it hazy in her periphery creatures crawling from the black maw of the tunnel, eyeless with piranha teeth.

 

She hears the opening chords of the mandolin, sharp and trembling, her father’s voice tone deaf through static over the radio. _Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home_.

 

Snakes spilling from the bowels of the tunnel, slithering through the water, the shine of black scales along her ankles. Not boiling, no, just a thousand serpents pouring from the belly of the beast, a welcoming committee, and for a moment she thinks of home.

 

Her father, _Send me home_. Her palms raw with splinters because she wanted it to be quick, painless for him, unbelievably miserable for her, to feel the pain in her hands for days, for weeks after. She reaches for her cross in prayer but touches smooth black stone, mahogany obsidian. Without her, an innocuous turquoise. In her hands a raw black splintered with petrified blood. It whispers to her, _home, home_. _Take me home_.

 

She wakes curled in Seth’s lap in the back of the cougar, her naked back against his bare chest, and so much sweat between them. She feels like she is on fire until she realizes it is him. His forehead hot under the back of her hand, a heat from his bandages against her palm. She cranks open a window, lets in the cold morning. What can she do besides cut him open and scoop out the rot? What can Richie do besides take away the last thing Seth thinks makes him better than his brother?

 

Richie is perched on the hood of the cougar staring at the horizon, guessing at the inscrutable place where the day will begin. He stares at the dark sky while his hands unwrap a fresh pack of Red Apples, and she asks him where he keeps his secret stash as she joins him on the hood. He taps out the first cigarette of the day. “Found them under the seat.”

 

“Seth has a fever.”

 

He fishes in his inner chest pocket for a light with the cigarette balanced on his lower lip, dry paper to paper thin skin she knows is soft. “He just runs hot.”

 

She doesn’t know if he is just playing dumb. Is he too afraid to think his brother might be dying? Shouldn’t he be able to smell the death on him? She smells something, not death, something that wasn’t there before, something like burning, like a funeral pyre.

 

Is that where she is coursing towards? Are all three of them meant to burn out? “I’m just rounding the bases towards hell fire and damnation,” she mutters half to herself, half to him, mostly to nothing.

 

He smiles, fucking little boy mean again. “You still think God is watching?”

 

“I miss Him,” she admits. He doesn’t miss her. Somehow she knows that. Something else misses her terribly. Somehow she feels that.

 

“I was there, Richie,” she reminds him. “I did things, too.” Side by side in an acid aquamarine wasteland, resigned to never return until something spat them back out into the world where colors are true. She cannot remember the how, what she forfeited, what was her toll, Richie’s. She checks her rearview, expecting to see lines of dusted boots on bleachers lit by incandescent mine lights, smoking and caged and stuttering. Richie spies her fingers brush across the gold cross nestled in her jugular notch, no wash of blood across her collar.

 

He passes her the cigarette. “Yeah, I know.”

 

She contemplates the lit end. “You think we’re supposed to be there?” Inhales and watches the ember come to life, hands it back.

 

He taps off the ash. “I told you what I think.” Gives her the last of the cigarette.

 

She flicks the spent cigarette out onto the playa. The sky is paling, an imminent sunrise dissolving the mist across the dry lake bed. The Winnie is still smoking.

 

Richie studies her, stares unabashed like he has always done, and she is used to it by now, lets him look. She never told him not to look. She watches the sun get closer and he watches her blood rise with it, because she wasn’t meant to be left in the dark, not meant to be kept in the cold. For the first time he thinks about what it would be like with his brother out of the picture and she would never be as lovely. He thinks for the first time without his brother – no, all three, there needs to be all three. He needs there to be all three.

 

He never knew where she fit either, only that she fit and that he didn’t mind her being there. She was always an aberration but never an unwelcome one, and she eases the tension between himself and his brother. He wants, needs that.

 

“We’re even.”

 

She chuckles. “Is it final now?”

 

“Yeah, I’m calling it,” he says.

 

He starts steaming when he hooks his arm along her shoulders, ignores the glare of the sun as it peaks over the furthest mesa, presses his mouth to her temple. “Let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.”

 

He hides in the shade of the backseat with his brother still passed out in the corner, checks Seth’s sweaty forehead and takes a whiff, smells something burning. “You’re not gonna die, brother,” he says, tipping his cooler brow against Seth’s.

 

“Fuck off, you fucking ice box,” his brother murmurs and Richie smiles sure as Kate steers them back onto the road.


	8. vide noir

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title from a Lord Huron song. 
> 
> Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis  
> Just Me and You by the Dreamliners  
> Adore by Savages  
> Vide Noir by Lord Huron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this happened. I find the more I code, the worse my prose gets. I tripped and fell on a plot. Also, this got dark. Fair warning. This just turned into one horror diatribe of blood, sex, violence, blood, choking – you know, like doing the laundry, everyday shit. I edited the tags accordingly. If I forgot something glaring that I should add to the tags, please let me know.

The cord pinches her on the soft part between her index and middle finger. She sucks at the tiny blood blister while the dial tone drones, finally knuckles the number with the receiver balanced against her ear. The ring tone nearly matches the rhythm of Barbara Lewis’s _Hello Stranger_ over the jukebox, and she taps her foot in time. Her mother loved this song, loved Barbara Lewis, had the complete collection. Her parents used to dance to this song. Her mother resting her head against her father’s shoulder, ignoring the acrylic itch from his ugly Christmas sweater, swaying with cupped hands, matching wedding bands with identical inscriptions. This was their song. It played when her father returned from a month-long mission in Mexico, when he asked her to marry him.

 

She peeks over her shoulder toward the back of the diner. Richie is rearranging the condiments to demonstrate something to Seth, his arms folded tight across his chest, either in contemplation or disagreement, she cannot tell. He hasn’t worn the sling in a while, doesn’t sleep as much, getting that itch again, his kind of normal and it is making them all feel a little better.

 

A little static click, a yawning hello, she smiles into the receiver. “Got your postcard.”

 

“Happy Birthday, of course.”

 

She murmurs her thanks. “Hey, don’t send mail here anymore.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“We’re not coming back.”

 

“I was gonna ask to borrow the Winnebago anyway, if you weren’t using it anymore.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Started another band. Need something to get the crew around in while we get on our feet. Do you still need it?”

 

“Um, I don’t – we lost it.”

 

He scoffs. “You crashed it?” Made it into a fire show.

 

“There was an accident,” she admits. “Sorry.”

 

He drops it. “No worries, I’m not surprised. We’ll figure something out. How is it living with the Kray twins?”

 

“Things are fine, a little hiccup in Reno, but good now.” She absentmindedly checks the coin drop slot, fingers out a spare quarter. “I’m glad you’re doing your music again.”

 

“Yeah, we’ve done a few gigs.” She expects more, wants more, a healthy dose of normalcy. “But, I think I have to put the band on the back burner. I’m glad you called. I was about to come up there myself.” Scott acts. For him, faith was never a substitute for action. “Freddie called a little while ago. We thought it was nothing.” It is never nothing, never just nothing. “He was having weird dreams again, figured they might just be flashbacks. But then, he got a visit from some former colleagues.” Sew buttons, she hopes stupidly. “Looking for those two. They mentioned you.”

 

“We haven’t exactly been low profile the last few months,” she tries. “I’d expect people don’t think the Geckos are dead anymore.”

 

“They had her necklace.”

 

She drops the receiver on the hook like it burns. She would have preferred a postcard.

 

She slides into the booth under Richie’s arm. “So what did Leonardo have to say?”

 

She fiddles with her cross, feels Richie eyeing her from the side, drops her hands in her lap. “All is well on the home front.”

 

“Good to know we aren’t going home to a shit show.” Seth sifts through the assortment of hot sauces in the little rack. “Time to get the house in order.”

 

The maple syrup drifts across the linoleum on the back of Richie’s knuckles, clinks with her plate of blueberry pancakes, breakfast for dinner. “You tell him we’re coming home?” She nods, drenches her pancakes in syrup. “Looking forward to it?”

 

“I’m just glad we are out of that tin can.”

 

* * *

 

 

He watches her pray like he thinks it is cute, like watching some small animal play or preen. “What are you praying for, peaches? Your soul?” He crosses himself next to the pew before sliding in. His hand on the back of the pew over her shoulder, knuckles grazing her neck when he takes a seat, spreads his legs to knock his knee into hers.

 

“I don’t pray for myself.” His fingers curl over, pressing into her clavicle. He drops a bottle of B vitamins in her lap, five-finger discounted. “Sometimes it’s just me hoping things will stay as they are.” Predictable chaos, expected. She studies the votives flickering near the altar, a fragile fellowship of prayers that grow brighter against the night breeding fears prompting them. “I pray it is really over.”

 

“Doesn’t feel like it?”

 

Privately to herself, not always.

 

She looks behind her at the church doors left ajar. “Who are you looking for, Katie Cakes?” Nothing. No one is coming.

 

“You know, Seth and I were raised Catholic,” he divulges like it is a secret. But, she already knows.

 

Richie marinates in his own mystery, deals in trivial facts to distract her, rarely offers up something of substance. Playing his cards so close to his chest, she really does not know anything about him other than what Seth has given – much more freely, she should add – or what she has taken. She wonders if it is because she stole so much, too much. Does he still feel violated? Privately she hoped letting him use her as his personal blood bank would soothe that breach of trust.

 

It isn’t entirely true, though, that she doesn’t know him. She just knows all the worst parts of him, every non-kosher uglier-than-sin thought that’s run through his head about his father, his brother, her. All the good stuff, the mundanities of his personality, his appearance, his interests, there is no story behind them, no background or springboard besides his brother. She has no context, so she just guesses at all of it, wonders how much of it she gets right.

 

He called them even. Maybe she’d gotten more right than she knew.

 

Her fingers graze his curled along her collar. She still tries simple affection. “Alright, wannabe boondock saint.”

 

He noses her temple, his hand slipping down between her bare thighs, no preamble. “Being in church always made me so –.” His index presses down on her cross. Richie does not understand simple affection. “How do you reconcile what you do with me?”

 

She peeks up at him, her nails digging into the wrist promptings her legs to uncross. “I don’t even try.”

 

Laid out on the pew and he is pulling her legs across his lap, her back sliding on the bench. “Richie, church,” she bites, snatching the words between her teeth, but he pushes one knee aside, slips his palm up along the inside of one thigh.

 

Someone slams the door to the sacristy, and Richie’s head pokes up over the back of the pew. Richie’s eyes follow the man across the transept, his fingers still skimming the elastic of her panties. The reverend spots him. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know anyone was still here. I’m closing up for the night.” He starts blowing out the lit votives, and Kate shoves Richie’s hand out from under her skirt.

 

“This is a house of God,” he chastises when he sees Kate’s head pop up to join Richie’s. “Not a cathouse.”

 

“We’re sorry, reverend. I fell asleep, and he came to wake me up,” she lies easily, smooths her skirt back over her thighs. The reverend makes his way up the aisle towards them. “We’ll be going,” she starts but fades out when she gets a good look at the man’s face.

 

 _Through you our community survives._ She feels sick, sicker when he stares, sizes her up, from her canvas shoes to her white sundress, the man next to her so clearly too old for her, their proximity. He places her on the scale, a heady exhale when he finds her wanting. Her pulse pounds behind her ears, boots pounding the bleachers. She hears Richie ask her if she is okay, but it is hard, a strain to hear him over the rhythmic applause, a bastardization of the thigh slapping and hymnal clapping. She sees a hundred palms raised to the ceiling of the cave, condensation stippling raptured faces when the blade carves another brilliant red smile, another drop in the bucket of sacrificial lambs. The reverend’s hands are drenched in it, and she feels her own blood clotting under his fingernails, along each crease in his palms, satisfying his powers that be and insulting her own.

 

 _Are we safe now?_ She hears the first one. _Did we do the right thing?_ Another and another.

 

The reverend opens the doors to the church, asks them to please leave. A boom echoes through the church, like a gunshot, and when she opens her eyes again, Richie has the reverend on the ground next to the pew, fistfuls of his black horsehair shirt tight in Richie’s hands.

 

“Richie, what’s happening?”

 

His eyes turn up, and the look, she cannot seem to get enough oxygen. It’s this high altitude. High. “You want me to kill him?” Blue irises swallowed up by blown pupils, he looks high.

 

She must have fallen asleep. It is a nightmare, because she hasn’t seen that look on his face since – it has to be a nightmare. Richie will come wake her up. He waits patiently, obediently, shoves his hand against the reverend’s mouth when he tries to protest, laughs while he does it. “You’re going to hell, the both of you!”

 

_I hope you burn in hell._

 

It barely sounds like her, disembodied, her voice thrown when she says, “Do it.”

 

It isn’t clean. She hears Richie open his throat, hears the flesh part, vessels tearing, a sick gurgling as the blood pours into Richie’s mouth. He doesn’t even have to try that hard. When his eyes flash up at her, grinning red, she sees the bleeding whites of his eyes, and her stomach curdles.  


Her eyes wide on the stained glass tableaus of Christ’s Passion, she thinks it is terror. The prickling racing across her skin spells horror but then relief. She feels it as the reverend dies under Richie’s mouth, the release of a hundred souls crying out in a hundred voices that all sound like her, a wash of relief that drowns out her doubts, reality or no.

 

Richie drops the body in the aisle, looks up at her panting, monster mouth a grisly mess. She almost says it, bites her tongue, _good dog_. Richie reaches for the hand limp at her side. “Come here.” He pulls her towards him on his knees in so much red, her canvas shoes dipped in the blood of the reverend. His mouth against her stomach, blood on white cotton, humid heat against her navel, and she feels the scrape of his teeth through the thin fabric. His hand slides up between her thighs again, eases towards the pulse centered between her legs, paints her panties, slips under the elastic and draws more red where she aches.

 

 “Richie, what’s happening?”

 

The reverend stares up at them with the startled glassy eyes of fresh roadkill just as Richie’s fingers reach up inside her. Her hips feel heavy. She has to balance herself with hands gripping his shoulders. Richie’s head disappears under her skirt. He pinches her panties aside, and her head lulls back as he swipes his rough tongue in one long line against her cunt. She’s about to fall backwards, her knees giving, when his hand splays along her lower back. But she can’t; her knees won’t work. So, she is back on the bench, Richie crawling up between her thighs, her hungry spiderman.

 

“This is a house of God,” she murmurs, tears pinched at the corner of her eyes. The man bleeds in the aisle, weakening spurts of remnant blood still pulsing from his throat, ravaged to bone, the puddle of red inching towards them.

 

“False gods,” he whispers before his tongue slithers back inside her. Fingers trace the edge of one white sock, smudging blood over the knitted sunflowers. He doesn’t seem to mind when she sinks her nails into the back of his neck, groans against her cunt, looks up at her through the false lenses of his glasses and sees her so clearly, the only saint worth praying to. This is how he prays. He gets his prayers right.

 

Her no keens, because she is too scared, muscles in her thighs stilted with a kind of panicked carnality. She feels like she will crawl out of her skin, presses her knuckles to her mouth, bites down on one, laves at the imprints her teeth leave behind and tastes iron, leftovers. _Hail Mary, full of grace_. Over and over again while he tries to crawls inside. _Pray for us sinners._ She keeps it going in her mind, counts each iteration with another shredded gasp, but she feels like she is praying to nothingness, mouthing apologies to someone who stopped listening a long time ago. No one is listening. No one is coming. Slip sliding towards the inevitable, she accidentally kicks the back of the next pew, feels Richie’s chuckle all the way inside her. No amount of benediction or confession will bring her back, and so she falls apart, dies against Richie’s mouth.

 

Her vision refocuses on the large bronze cross mounted above the altar, and she realizes He left her behind years ago. Her fingers card absentmindedly through the tacky stick of Richie’s pomade while he nips the inside of her thigh. She wonders if it was when He figured out she was meant for something else, someone else, if it happened when He decided she was a better fit for somewhere else, because she does fit with them. It scares her sometimes how well she fits. She feels the poke of canines extending, and yanks his head back none too gently. He laughs anyway, rolls back the human façade. _Fine, fine._

 

Her dress is smudged with bloody fingerprints, so Richie helps her into his suit jacket, buttons it up. He unbuttons his shirt, stuffs it into one of the jacket pockets. No one can see the blood on black. They wash their hands in the font near the entrance, and Richie helps her get under the nails.

 

Outside, she asks him, “Why do I feel like God can’t see me when I’m with you two?”

 

He looks up at the bruised sky and smiles.

 

* * *

 

Nothing is settled.

 

She ignores it. She really tries. It is easier that way, to just file it in the back of her mind, because if she addresses it directly, what changes.

 

Things have been different since the church. Something has shifted inside her, something getting its sea legs back, stretching out into her limbs, reasserting its place in her world. There is a new congruency that was not there before, tension easing between the remnants of the queen and the _santa sangre_ and all the little Kate compartments scattered around them.

 

Small town America. The first road signs they spot are for the church or the cemetery, and you get either or with towns like that, religion or the grave, usually both. Bethel was that kind of town, she remembers. You lived by the church, you married in the church, you baptized your children there, and they bury you not long after. Your life started with that church. It ended with the cemetery the next block over. Small town America gets it right, boils down the components of life to its most basic, an anticipated beginning and a certain end.

 

She wonders if she has a gravestone marked somewhere. There is no one left from before that would remember to put one up for her, her family. Has small town America forgotten the Fullers? Did the Fullers exist somewhere? She still has a picture of her family whole, once.

 

She watches dust devils die on the other side of the glass and eons of desert like some twisted alien landscape of nothing, like a post-apocalypse with another fading sign for the church, the cemetery sweeping behind them.

 

 _Doing bad things to bad people feels good doesn’t it?_ She whispered to Kate once, whispered through the fragile veil separating her consciousness from the other while she proved the actuality of Seth’s soul. She confirmed the reality of Seth’s soul, and even Kate felt a little amazed to find it. Kate remembers feeling unbearably warm, sated. To be human is to want, to be dissatisfied, but Kate didn’t feel very human in that moment. She wondered if God wants.

 

She doesn’t like liquor or cigarettes, only did these things by association, but it surprises her how few bad habits she picked up from her parents and how many she has filched off the brothers.

 

She takes a seat at the bar and orders a Coke. She is waiting for a phone call, the signal for her to come get them. Seth left the note on the nightstand, hasty scribbles detailing the time, the phone number, the name of the bar, the kind of place that’s not gonna card, not gonna care. Somewhere along the way, between Barstow and Burns, she stopped letting her curiosity get the better of her, stopped asking questions that only wasted her time, theirs. She learned it was easier to just jump when she heard jump, tuck and roll when the situation called for it.

 

She tips a bowl of pretzels towards her, realizes someone used it as an ash tray, lets it wobble back against the bar top. Her shoulders shift under Richie’s denim jacket. She’s hungry. The saccharine sweetness of the Coke makes her hungrier. She asks the bartender if the kitchen is open yet, and he hands her a menu.

 

“My treat.” The man slides onto the stool next to her, the tips of his boots clicking loud against the bar, steel toes. “Hello stranger.”

 

Scott used to play this prank on her, something cruel and stupid a brother would do just to get a rise out of her. He would pin her arms under his knees and tap his index against her sternum over and over again. She would writhe and kick and endure it until he either got his fill of her suffering or their father prompted him to let her go with a none too gentle twist of the ear. Scott kept doing it until she learned to hook her legs up around his torso and slam him backwards. The first time she did this, his skull cracked against the hardwood. That sound, the bruising on her sternum, the aching thump of his finger jabbing, missing sometimes and stabbing her jugular notch. _Hello stranger_.

 

She rubs her sternum, turns towards the man and flashes her best girl-next-door smile, apple cheeks dimpled, her hair shifting over her shoulder. “That’s mighty white of you.”

 

He introduces himself. She immediately forgets. “Aren’t you a little young?” His gaze dips to her jean shorts, tilts back up when she asks him how old he thinks she might be, wants to ask how old he wants her to be. He inspects her driver’s license and snorts. “I bet it’s a good fake ID, but you don’t fool me.”

 

 _People see what they want to see_ , she thinks.

 

The phone rings. She stretches her hand towards the bartender expectant. He ignores her and balances the receiver against his ear while drying glasses fresh from the dish washer. Mumbles in the affirmative after a moment and hands her the phone. She thanks him, listens to Seth explain, excuse, rationalize, prevents herself from admitting how much she doesn’t care. The bartender takes the receiver back, and she turns to the man in the steel-toed boots. She asks him for a ride home. Her brothers are running late.

 

It’s not her. But, it is her. A paradox but it feels so good. It is happening again. She just feels so hungry. The reverend had woken her up to an old hunger, and she is only starting to realize how long she had been starving herself.

 

She devours a predator’s soul, someone looking for a fresh prostitot, in the driver’s seat of his suped-up Ram, and it fills her up again. It only ever surfaced for the briefest of moments when she was the queen, a morbid indulgence too infrequent, something she would never admit to craving. It feels better to know she is not the first one to grace his cab, pleased to be one of many in a long line of minor casualties. She gets that, too, every murmured self-conscious plea to stop, _stop, stop_. It feels like she swallowed a million butterflies, wingbeats in her gut thumping in time with his fading, desperate pulse.

 

She pats his chest, the sound hollow. “Your treat.” His dick is still hard between her legs straddling him, and she hears Richie telling her post-mortem priapism was more common than one would think. It all depended on the method of their demise. She imagines the look on his face if she divulged that choice bite of information, to offer him another fun fact for his encyclopedia of the macabre, if it would please him to know.

 

* * *

 

 

“Where’s Richie?” She gets out in the brief gaps when his mouth is busy somewhere else.

 

“Cleaning up,” he rasps, spreading his palms along her lower back, fingers dipping into the dimples just above her peach of an ass.

 

“You made a mess?” Her fingers graze along the nape of his neck, tracing the serpentine coils of ink. The way she says it, like she can imagine it, intrigued by the probability of just how far they went.

 

“Things got messy,” he grinds out. He thinks they might be losing their touch, because there was nothing practiced about how this last con played out. He just wants to find a little bit of equilibrium with her, but she whispers how much she wishes he would make her messy, too.

 

He killed someone. Judge, jury, executioner, he killed someone, and there was nothing necessary about it. Richie didn’t even ask why. He didn’t blink. He looked at the body like it was leftovers and told Seth to call Kate.

 

Kate unbuttons his pants, slips her hand inside to palm him through his jockeys. Her teeth tug at his bottom lip, a bad habit he knows she picked up from Richie, but it doesn’t stop his fingers drifting down the back of her shorts, barely enough room to get in between the tight denim.

 

There is a bullet missing in his Redhawk. _To be her right hand_. He didn’t bother to replace it. _To be Judgment._ He stared down that empty chamber. The muscles in his right shoulder spasmed, seized. He flipped the cylinder back in place, shoved the revolver back in his shoulder holster, tucked safe under his suit jacket. Kate mended the hole.

 

He flips her over, a little puff of air against his cheek as her back hits the mattress. He yanks her shorts down roughly, ignores her protest when they catch on a knee, jerking the joint the wrong way momentarily until he wrestles them all the way off. Her hand flattens against his chest, but he leans in, pushes his knees up under her thighs, shoving her shirt up her abdomen, meeting no resistance when he realizes there is nothing underneath, no barriers left.

 

He hears the scuffing of dead meat across the concrete, Richie dragging the man by his arm towards the back of the loading dock. The man’s shoe catches on a foundation column; his arm dislocates from the socket, the pop and crack of bone disconnecting from bone, but Richie keeps tugging him along.

 

No mark he leaves on her will last, and so he doesn’t feel bad about leaving as many as he can. He can feel her nails through the bandages around his shoulder. Her kid gloves are coming off, and he feels less inclined to keep pussyfooting himself, less and less with each time.

 

“I’m hungry,” she whines, her knees insistent against his hips, nudging his pants down. He pins one of her hands to the bed, fingers cringed like spider’s legs against the sheets and her wrist bones straining against his palm. His other hand shoves her knee higher as he pushes inside. His gut burns, his thoughts are smoking, and her free hand is tugging at his shirt collar, but she throws her head back with a drawn out moan like he is the only thing that could satisfy.

 

If he lets her touch him, he thinks he will go crazy. It is easy to get both her wrists in one of his hands. She makes it easy. She wants him to. Her mouth is cherry pink perfection, tastes like sweet cola. Wry when she says _harder_ , praising him when he delivers.

 

He remembers her sounding bored over the phone, no questions asked. But, getting back to the motel and her climbing into his lap the moment he sat down on the edge of the bed. “My treat.” Like he was hers. Dessert.

 

His palm slips over the extended column of her throat, fingers curling over one distended tendon and squeezing, putting everything back in its place. He is fucking infected. He thought it was them dragging her down, that it was horrible what they were doing to her, what they would end up doing to her, eventually. Starting to realize maybe, only maybe, that it was the other way around, had been for a while now. _It’s a gift, brother_.

 

His grip tightens and she responds in kind, clenching enough to disorient, that his thrusts shorten, quicken, her thighs tensing against his hips. He drops his head to watch his dick disappear, reappear briefly, the subtle jumping of the muscles in her lower belly, the anticipated fluttering surrounding him. His forehead burns against her sternum, his hold on her wrists forgetting its strength, preoccupied with the barely restrained control his other hand has on her windpipe. She is going to come, with his hand wrapped around her throat, fucking her into the headboard of a cheap motel bed. Her nails are demarcating territory across his shoulder blades, along the straining tendons in his cramping wrist, but her hips continue to rock back against his, getting what she needs.

 

He doesn’t hear her come, but he feels it. Jesus, he feels it. His mind goes blank as he comes too.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up on top of his soaked outline in the linen sheets feeling like someone took a rock hammer to his skull. His eyes trace the headlights moving across the sallow yellow motel walls, thankful Kate is on her side of the bed. Adding any more heat to this equation might actually set him on fire. He sits up, and she murmurs but doesn’t wake when he scoots off the bed, the mattress shifting.

 

He should call Richie. His brother was supposed to be back hours ago.

 

He walks over to desk chair, sifts through his suit jacket pockets for a pack, comes up empty. He isn’t sure a cigarette would help things. His lungs feel like he might have smoked a carton.

 

He goes to the bathroom to take a piss. Runs his hand through his hair, needs a cut. Flushes, washes his hands, on auto pilot ignoring the fever heat. Notices something in the mirror, an inconsistency. He peels up the edge of the bandages, reveals a much larger inconsistency, removes the bandages completely. It is healed, mostly, some of it still bruised and purpling, but the scar tissue extends much farther than the injury itself, farther than seems likely or possible. He presses his fingers to the scarring borders, and it doesn’t feel very much like normal scar tissue, doesn’t even feel like skin. “Holy hell.”

 

He shrugs on a t-shirt and slips out of the motel room. He needs a drink. Or a doctor.

 

Richie clips up the concrete steps, wrinkled suit, half-smoked cigarette pinched between his teeth. “Hey brother.”

 

“I’m going to the bar if you want to join me.”

 

But, Richie pushes him back against the wall. He yanks the collar of Seth’s shirt down just enough to see it, what he has been ruminating on, only guessing at for a couple weeks. “Have you been taking your antibiotics?”

 

“Yes, Richard, fuck.”

 

Richie lets go of his shirt, smokes his cigarette, regards his brother impassively.

 

“You don’t seem too concerned,” Seth accuses, shifting his shoulder like he feels something crawling around in there.

 

Richie smiles. She just inadvertently took care of something he had been meaning to get around to for a while now but hadn’t yet fully figured out how he was going to go about it. He watches the wheels turning in Seth’s head, brief confusing short circuits before the implications set in.

 

“Something’s happening to us, Richie.”

 

He offers him the last of his cigarette. “Something’s always happening to us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Baptists generally do not say the Hail Mary prayer.


End file.
